Night of the Mark
by SilverLocke980
Summary: (FINISHED) It's the night of the mark, when the hellish Crests appear, and the Zoanthropes feel them rending their souls. So come with me, my friends, and let us fly forth to watch... and record.
1. Default Chapter

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN BLOODY ROAR OR ANY CHARACTERS THEREOF.  
  
[]- Indicates thought.  
  
Man. I shouldn't write one-shots. They always make me want to write actual stories. So, to quell my Bloody Roar urges, I'll make ANOTHER one-shot. If enough people review and actually like it, I'll make it a full-fledged story. One note, before I go on: I am a Christian, and that comes out in my writing. If you don't like that, I'm not forcing you to read this. If you are a Christian as well, then welcome my brother/sister. Good to see you here, in this great world of fanfiction. BR3 has a lot of Christian and pseudo-religious elements, so I'm basically just elaborating on them.  
  
This story is from the various characters' points of view on the night when the Crests erupt on everybody's body. Obviously, there are a LOT of problems about to result. And I'm going to record it all.  
  
So, bottoms up, zip your flies, and hold on to your asses, because it's...  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Bloody Roar  
  
Night of the Mark  
  
Graveyard outside Tokyo, 9:30 p.m.  
  
The wind blows above this peaceful place, this final stop for the dead. It is dark, here in the heart of Japan. This land where the sun rises is now the land where the sun has just set, and not until seven thirty the next morning will the sun peek it's head above the horizon to the east, bringing light and a new day to the world. For the moment, this part of the world lies in darkness, and in darkness does our tale begin and end.  
  
But that is not to say that our tale is an evil one. Darkness, spiritually speaking, does represent evil, but here we are talking about physical darkness, and it is neutral. It is neither good nor evil, just there. And sometimes, it is in darkness that the best hearts lie.  
  
But, once again, that is neither here nor there. Let us glide, my friends, on wings that make not the slightest sound. Let us glide down the air currents, my fellow memories, and see what we can make of this place. We are here to record, to watch, to view, and not to take part in what will happen. So, light as the breeze and just as unseeable, we fly down from our vantage point (our bird's-eye view, as it were) and alight on any comfortable perches that present themselves. A gravestone, a tree branch, the ground itself. Where we rest our wings matters not. We are here to watch.  
  
And here, now, walking up the path from the glittering city below, a bouqet of roses in one hand, red leather jacket swirling, comes the man we are here to watch. His silver hair blows in the wind, and he tightens the collar of his jacket against the wind, shivering. It is spring, here in Tokyo, and though the days are warm, the nights still belong to winter. Old Jack Frost is still quite active here, wanting a few more days to play in Japan before taking on the other half of the world. The man approaching us just happens to be a handy target.  
  
The man's name is Xion. He is a Zoanthrope, though he doesn't know it yet. And he comes here every week, sometimes twice a week. His sister has been dead for five months now, and he still cries over her. She became strange, his sister, before meeting her end; a year before she died (in a strange fire that consumed her home, her car, and every cell in her body), he had heard that she had joined a Satanic cult (Xion himself, sadly enough, has no religion). That was bullshit, as far as he was concerned. He knew his sister too well to believe she would do such a thing.  
  
Or so he believed.  
  
Xion opens the lonely gate of the cemetery, it's hinges creaking slightly as he opens it. He steps in, passing us as he walks on a path that is now far too familiar to him. He walks with a heavy heart, for his sister was the last member of his family that he knew of. It had hurt him deeply when she died. As he passes us, on our various perches, we follow him, silent as shadows and far more watchful. Xion treads the path, his face looking down, long silver hair hanging in his face. No tears mist his eyes, however; he has moved past the stage where scouring tears cleanse the soul of pain. He is moving towards acceptance, that step all who grieve must take, or be dragged down by their grief into madness. As we are about to see, it might be better for him if he did go insane.  
  
He walks the twisting path, steps slow and measured, the heels of his boots clicking softly against the road. Wind sighs through the trees, bringing up a favorite song of his, one his sister had never liked but which has always held a special place in his heart. It's One Headlight, by the Wallflowers, and it's verses pass through his mind as he walks through the graveyard.  
  
[ So long ago I don't remember when,] he thinks, the tune playing in his mind, Jakob singing the song which became a hit on the radio years ago and now has faded into memory. [ That's when they say I lost my only friend.]  
  
[ They say she died easy of a broken heart disease,] Xion thinks, as he finally walks up to his sister's grave. [ I listen to the cemetery trees.]  
  
[ And I do,] he thinks sadly, staring down at her grave, [ I listen to the cemetery trees crying softly in the night.]  
  
Xion is something of a budding poet, a writer with fine makings. If what is about to happen to him did not occur tonight (or ever, for that matter), then he might have gone on to become a poet of some small renown, or maybe even a legend. We do not know.  
  
We watch.  
  
As Xion crouches down to lay the bouqet of roses on his sister's grave, he hears something, something like the patter of rain. He looks up, wondering if it's starting to rain, though the weather guy said it would be clear tonight. He doesn't want rain to spoil his leather jacket. When he looks up, he sees something that drives his jacket to the back of his mind.  
  
Supported by uncountable tentacles of darkness, a black so utterly stark that it is visible even now, during the night, a face is floating in front of him. His sister's face, to be more exact. As he stares, too stunned for words, it smiles at him. Instead of the usual human teeth, it's mouth is full of fangs more suited to a shark. The mouth opens wide and rushes forward, covering his face with darkness, invading his eyes, his nose, his ears, his mouth, his pores, anywhere there is an opening. He falls to the ground, holding his face and screaming, legs kicking, feet pounding, trying all he can to move the hellish thing away from his face. Soon enough, the darkness and the tendrils of blackness flow into his face, into his body, into his mind. Into his very soul. He stops struggling for a second, lying calmly on the dirt road of the cemetery. Then one hand lifts, flexes. Knuckles pop. The hand moves downward, touches the ground. Almost mechanically, like a robot trained to mimic a rising human, Xion stands up. His eyes glow with something unholy, their normal color now replaced by a complete blackness, a total dark. He grins, his teeth noticeably sharper than they were when he first entered, almost like fangs. He starts chuckling, then breaks out laughing. His voice seems to be two at once, his baritone male voice and a higher pitched, more feminine one, a darker one.  
  
And on the notes of that rising laughter, we lift our wings and fly off. There are many things to see tonight, and what has transpired in this graveyard with Xion is but the first stop on our tour.  
  
We glance back once more, and we see a familiar light flicker around him, a light we've all noticed occurring whenever a Zoanthrope decides it's time to cut the crap and turns into their beast form. But what's in this light is no animal of earth. It is a thing of legend, a hellish demon, an Unborn. No mother, no father, just darkness and evil. It's eyes glow red with the evil inside it's soul. It begins running in a straight line, ignoring the gravestones (except for the ones marked with crosses- these it avoids instinctively, almost like an animal shunning a trap) and trees in it's way, stomping through them, rending them like a force of nature turned loose on the world, a hurricane from Hell sent to wreck ruin and destruction.  
  
Let's get out of here, shall we? I don't think any of us want to see any more of this... thing.  
  
And so, once more, we lift our wings and fly.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Nomonura house, Tokyo. 9:50 p.m.  
  
From one extreme to the other we fly, my friends. This place is the complete anti-thesis of the graveyard we just saw. It is a place of happiness, of light. It's cheery red brick (rare in this city) and brown tin roof all conspire to create a feeling of cozy country life, quite at odds with this city of metal and glass. The noise of a TV greets us, and in our heightened state we can immediately translate the Japanese weatherman, forecasting the clear night and day Xion was just so lately thinking about. We glide down, to get a closer look at this house and it's inhabitants. The windows are closed (as I have said before, the days may be warm, but the nights are bitter here in Tokyo), but that's all right. Through the keyhole we slip, past the tumblers and locks, sliding through the brass and coming out the other side unharmed. We pause a moment to orient ourselves, gazing about at this fine house, trying to see if the inside lives up to the expectations we have from our look at the outside.  
  
We are not dissapointed. This is a place that radiates security, that radiates comfort. It is a place of love, of the better things in life. On the far wall, family pictures (most of them centering around either a blue haired, red eyed woman or a brown eyed, brown haired girl, both of whom we will be meeting soon enough) hang from their hooks, and beneath them a trophy case sits, showcasing the awards the two girls have won. Our sight, good enough to make an eagle feel blind, zooms in on the words engraved below the trophies. Underneath a woman's figure spiking a ball over a net, in engraved gold lettering (it's really brass covered with gold, but that's beside the point; it's worth is in what it represents, not what it's made out of), one bears this statement: WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL TOURNAMENT, FIRST PLACE, ALICE NOMONURA. This is the blue haired young lady shown in the pictures on the wall. Her skill at volleyball directly relates to her extreme jumping skill, which is far better than it should be... but there will be time for that later.  
  
Focusing on another trophy, we see a far different picture, that of a karate student striking a combat pose, one foot planted on the ground, the other striking an invisible target. A far more interesting subject than volleyball, no? But let us look at the plate below. WOMEN'S KARATE TOURNAMENT, TEENAGE DIVISION, THIRD PLACE, URIKO NOMONURA. Ah. Looks like little sister has some work to do on her martial arts. God knows she will need every drop of skill she has, soon enough.  
  
As our gaze moves across the warm room (colored beige, we notice, a nice warm shade of beige), we note the three entrances into the room, besides the door we so easily bypassed: a door in front to a wash room, stairs to the right of it, and to our right a way into the kitchen. The sounds of cooking emanate from it, but before we can investigate that particular spot, we see the back of a green sofa. One lanky arm, thrown back over the couch, covered in a silk kimono, catches our attention. A brown-topped head peeks up next to the arm, the head of a young girl laying back on the couch. On the other end of the love seat, dangerously close to a defenseless lamp, her feet rest on a desk. She is wearing socks, white socks that contrast with the endangered lamp's blue color. The desk is of fine varnished wood that possesses a light sheen in the light from the overhead ceiling fan. The three light bulbs of the fan spread their light beneath the still fan blades. This is all we can see from our position at the door, so we glide over to get a better glimpse at this girl, to get a better glimpse of this youngest member of the Nomonura household.  
  
But, before we do, in comes the eldest sister of this house, Alice Nomonura herself, a nurse trained in the arts of healing, a kind soul. She is walking in from the kitchen where a previously unnoticed scent wafts in, the smell of rice and beans cooking. A lighter, crisper scent follows it, the smell of lettuce. Alice loves salads, but she only eats them when her boyfriend isn't around; he cracks too many jokes about her beast form (that of a rabbit) and her taste in food for her to eat them in his presence. Alice is in love with him, but more than once she's wanted to beat him senseless over that wise mouth of his. If she didn't know she'd regret it later, she'd have done it long ago.  
  
Her boyfriend isn't on her mind at the moment, however. For some reason she's begun to have a headache, a most horrible one, right in the back of her skull. It feels like someone's inside and very anxious to be out. She's taken some medicine for it, but the ache remains. It started a few minutes ago, right in the middle of her cooking, and there was no gradual build-up to it; one moment she was fine, the next her head was throbbing. She has lost her appetite, and plans on telling Uriko that supper was ready and then heading up to her bed. She walks up to her sister, her feet slightly wobbly, her body feeling too shaky to stand for long. Holding the back of her head, right between the two ponytails she always keeps her hair in, she says to her sister, " Supper's ready, little sis."  
  
We follow the direction of Alice's red eyes and catch our first glimpse of Uriko Nomonura, and what a glimpse it is. Uriko is a pretty girl by any standard, the kind of brunette beauty who is always getting noticed in high school or the mall. But underneath her normal beauty is something even more entrancing, something that draws you to her. Maybe it's the unself-conscious way she has of moving, of not noticing her own beauty. Maybe it's the aura she has of confidence, of guts. An inner reserve of strength, flashing out in the way she moves, her fluid grace. Or maybe it is all but a carefully maintained illusion. We will watch, and find out. It is what we are here for, and what we will do. Currently, Uriko is wearing an evening dress kimono, a very pretty green one that fits her well.  
  
In response to her sister's statement, Uriko stretches languidly, almost like a cat, before rising. " Ok, sis. Thanks for cooking." Noticing the way her sister is holding the back of her head, the wobble in her sister's knees, she asks her worriedly, " Hey sis, are you all right? You don't look so good."  
  
Alice shakes her head. Above all else, she doesn't want to worry her little sister with a little headache. " I'm okay. Just got a headache. I'm gonna go to bed early, okay? Try to sleep it off."  
  
Uriko gives her sister a little hug of reassurance, hugging her gently, and says, " Okay. Good night, sis."  
  
Smiling despite the pounding in the back of her head, Alice says, " Yeah. Good night to you too. No staying up later than twelve, okay?"  
  
Uriko nods. It isn't a school night, here in Tokyo, but Alice makes her go to bed at twelve anyway. Uriko thinks it's because her mom never let her stay up either. Thinking of her mom, Uriko wonders whether she's okay. Her mother (in reality, it's her adopted mother, but Uriko always thinks of her as her real mother) is off now, on a trip to America, hunting an old enemy named Hans. Uriko has never met Hans, but has heard of his evil ways, and her mother has a personal score to settle with him. Rumors and sightings of Hans floated out of her mom's American contacts (mostly other Zoanthropes) and so she set off to find him. Uriko hopes her mom is all right. She doesn't want her getting hurt, though her mom can take care of herself. A statement true for Zoanthropes in general.  
  
Uriko enters the kitchen to eat the fine vegetarian meal her sister has prepared (although Uriko herself prefers meat, particularly barbecue, which she has an almost unhealthy obsession for) and leaves this part of our tale. Alice has more to say on our story at the moment, so we follow her, throbbing head and all, up the stairs. We glide as shadows up the bannister, as her wobbling footsteps begrudge her each step, keeping herself moving only by reminding herself of the bed at the end of the stairs. We glide past her (some on feathered wings and some on leathern wings, but like light and dark these signify no allegiance in and of themselves) and enter the bedroom. It is the typical young woman's bedroom, with a mirror, a dresser, and a nightstand beside a nice, soft-looking twin sized bed. Photographs sit next to the bed, three the normal family pictures of her mother, her father (now deceased, alas), and her sister, one the confident smirk of her boyfriend, chest bare, boxing gloves and shorts on, striking a pose right before a big match. It usually cheers her up to look at it, but tonight she can barely see straight, and slips into bed without even glancing at it. A cross hangs above the foot of her bed, and as she glances at it, a small prayer enters her mind before sleep takes her past all thought and pain.  
  
[ Heavenly Father, protect Your children tonight.]  
  
Soon after Alice's head hits the pillow, she enters a deep state more like a coma than sleep. She will remain in this state for the next two hours (it is now 10:00), when she will be forcibly woken by the ferocious pounding on her door that unsettles it's hinges, by the frantic young man carrying his bleeding brother into the front door... but that, as I said, is two hours off. We've other things to see tonight before then, and nothing of much interest is going to happen at the Nomonura house in the meantime. So, let us glide off once more, through a convenient crack in the window, and enjoy our wings as we fly over the rooftops of this slumbering city.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Three blocks away from the Nomonura house. 10:04.  
  
As we fly, we notice the truth of the idea that cities never sleep. The young man walking down the street, the cars coming and going to destinations unknown, and the young woman we are currently flying over all stand as mute testimony to that idea. Likewise, the three thugs hiding in the shadowed alley this young woman is about to pass all support the statistics of crime in this city. This woman is about to get robbed, scared very badly (and more than likely beaten on, especially if she doesn't try to resist), possibly raped, and more than likely killed. It's not one of life's more pleasant truths, but it is a truth nonetheless: Evil is everwhere. We wish we could lend our aid to this woman, but we cannot. As I said before, we are memories, shadows, and cannot affect this world. We alight on nearby perches and prepare to perform our new duty. We watch and wait.  
  
The young woman, oblivious to the dark alley and what it holds, walks by at a rapid pace, fashionable new coat held in one hand at the neck (in eerie imitation of Xion; so much of this night leads back to him), purse hanging at her side, her high-heeled shoes tapping out their own steady rhythm on the concrete. As she passes the alley, a hand shoots out, draped in a non-descript black sweatshirt. The hand grabs her arm, and before the woman has time to do anything at all, she is jerked off the street and into the alley, where she will presumably be left to the ministrations of the three robbers. Two of them, wearing ski masks, grin wickedly beneath them; the last one, bigger than the others, cracks the knuckles of the hand he grabbed her with and smiles too. His smile is visible, however; he wears no mask. Since he usually kills anyone he grabs, it has never mattered much. He steps forward, intending to take the woman's purse from her, along with her clothes and anything else of value on her. Then he will rape her, kill her, and throw her body into a river. She will become just another statistic for the politicians to use at their annual rallies in Japan. We sit uneasily, aware for the first time of how absolutely infuriating it is to be omniscient and yet powerless. We cannot lift a hand to help this woman, nor can we go to the police and identify her killers after the crime is done. We see all, flying above the city, but cannot lift a hand or claw to aid this woman.  
  
Before anything can happen, however, someone else does it for us. A shadowy figure drops from the rooftops above, landing down from the eight story fall as easily as we (in more mortal guise) would land from a fall of two feet. Crouching down to knees as it falls, the figure raises up, it's glowing yellow eyes visible in the dark. It now stands between the frightened young woman and the three muggers, scarf blowing in the bitter wind, obscuring most of his face. In the dim light, all the woman can make out of the figure before her is a sense of strength, of purpose. Whoever he is, he has just made a maneuver previously seen only in comic books and movies, and the woman is not sure she isn't just dreaming, the figure before her a fantasy brought on by her terrified mind, played for comfort a few seconds before reality kicks in and she looks up at the face of her killer. Very fortunately for her, this is not the case.  
  
" What the hell?" the mugger snarls. He himself isn't too sure he just saw this guy drop from the clouds, but figures that he might as well believe it for the moment. " Who are you?"  
  
" Your worst nightmare," the figure says in a strangely sibilant voice, hissing slightly on the end of worst. The mugger figures that the guy's voice is simply being distorted by his scarf, and shrugs it off, trying to ignore the cold chill the man's words inspire, cliched though they are.  
  
" Oh, really?" the mugger says, cracking his knuckles in false bravado. " In case you didn't notice, it's three against one. You don't stand a chance in hell, buddy. You better have one hell of a good plastic surgeon, cause when I'm through with you there won't be much left of your face." Rushing forward, committing an act that would cause every single sensei on the planet, regardless of personal style, to groan aloud, putting all the strength in him into a single really good, really powerful punch. It was also really easy to counter.  
  
The figure in front of him raises one hand, and in the dim light we notice that it actually looks like a claw (which makes one thing clear, if nothing else; this is a Zoanthrope, all right) and grabs the mugger's hand. Pushing it aside easily, not even calling upon his great strength, the Zoanthrope counters with a hard punch in the face, knocking out most of the mugger's front teeth in one go. The big mugger staggers back, spitting blood and bits of broken enamel from his mouth, wondering what in the hell just hit him. Spluttering, his voice slurry with blood, he cries out, " Get him!" to his comrades. Like the fools they are, they do. Both rush forward in imitation of their leader, attempting to bear this rogue vigilante down with sheer numbers.  
  
Of course, against a Zoanthrope, humans had better forgo the entire hand-to-hand combat idea and bring a gun. A big one, preferably. But people like these muggers never think before acting. Fools rush in, indeed. With considerably more ease than we had a few minutes ago, we settle into our perches and watch this noble Zoanthrope take care of business.  
  
The figure spins into a low sweep kick, knocking one mugger off his feet. His partner, having been slower than his buddy and hence dodging the sweep by accident, rushes forward to beat on the crouching figure. The Zoanthrope's hand shoots out, grabbing the mugger's leg, a movement so fast that even our heightened senses can barely see it. Lifting the mugger like a rag doll, the Zoanthrope lifts him over his head, standing as he does so, and slams him into the ground. The mugger hits the pavement with a muffled cry, the back of his skull fractured. The Zoanthrope gets both hands about the mugger's legs and proceeds to smash him against the nearest hard object, in this case a handy stone wall. The would-be robber passes out, suffering multiple concussions that knock him out for three days, when he wakes up in a jail cell in downtown Tokyo.  
  
The second mugger has gotten up by now, and he does not like how things are going. He likes it not one bit. He stands unsteadily, not knowing whether to fight or flee from this strange creature. It has gotten through his slow mind that it might be a Zoanthrope he's fighting, and that scares him badly. His decision is made for him when a foot slams into his stomach. He doubles over, the air knocked out of him, and before he can do more than register the pain in his stomach he is grabbed on the sides (by hands that feel, sickeningly, like claws through his sweatshirt) and bodily lifted up over the Zoanthrope's head. He is turned in the air, a strange sort of powered somersault that reminds him of throws he's seen professional wrestlers do, and suddenly becomes reacquainted with the pavement he has just so recently met. He lands on his back, his head cracks against the street, and he knows no more.  
  
As we have been watching and cheering on this hero, the last mugger has been backing up, and now he extracts a switchblade knife from his back pocket. He presses a small switch on the side, and a six-inch blade pops out. He gazes at the figure before him with brute malice.  
  
" I'm gonna carve you up, freak," he says, specks of his blood flecking the air from the holes where most of his front teeth were.  
  
The Zoanthrope says nothing, just raises his hand, palm out, towards the mugger. As the mugger, dumbfounded, watches, the Zoanthrope's body tenses, and his hand's finger partially close in a claw position, pointing at the mugger from the second knuckles out. Not really understanding what's going on, the mugger rushes forward, blade gleaming in the light from the streetlamps and windows about him. He almost reaches the Zoanthrope's outstretched arm, but before he does something crackles in the air. An invisible something flies out of the Zoanthrope's body and strikes the mugger. The most intense pain he's ever felt surges through him, and the metal in his hand suddenly grows hot, so hot it partially melts the skin of his hand and brands the flesh of his finger and thumb with it's imprint. He cannot even scream out, for all his muscles have suddenly locked and grown paralyzed. He is suffering the classic effects of a powerful electric surge. His eyes roll back into his head, and the Zoanthrope, seeing that the mugger will do no more harm tonight, relaxes his hand, and the invisible force seems to relax as well. The mugger drops to the concrete like a puppet whose strings have been cut, having passed out shortly into his impromptu electroshock treatment. As he falls, the Zoanthrope turns around to look at the woman he has just saved.  
  
She looks up at him, eyes filled with tears she did not have to spill, face softening with gladness as she gazes at her savior. When he steps forward, into the light, her eyes widen and her face tenses again, not with fear but with shock.  
  
The figure before her is Stun, formerly a scientist alongside Busuzima (whose unpleasant acquaintance we will make later on in the night) and now the only Insect Zoanthrope in the world. He is purple, the purple of certain beetles in Africa, part of the races that make up his beast side. His hands are claws, tipped with blades; his body is distorted in various places, in the wrong places, where his bones have shifted and changed and warped over the past few years. Bandages cover one side of his body, where the kind Alice Nomonura we left sleeping half an hour ago has constricted his form so that the bones won't shift suddenly and break through his skin. The lower half of his face, where normal humans have a mouth and where Stun has mandibles (which give him a sibilant hiss on certain words and sounds), is covered by a scarf. His eyes glow yellow, the pupils mutated slits. This is Stun as a human, a mutant bug man. The Zoanthrope scientists found out, during their nightmarish testing, that while human DNA mixed quite readily with the DNA of mammals and (to a lesser degree) reptiles, it responded violently to that of insects. Stun is the sole surviving Zoanthrope experiment with insect DNA, and his life is a tortured non-existence, relying mostly on the kindness of other Zoanthropes to survive, though even some of them find him hideous. It is not an easy life, to say the least.  
  
And yet...  
  
Is his form truly a curse? For you see, my friends, Stun is the one Zoanthrope immune to the nightmarish Tabula that even now is being summoned. The pain he suffers when his body twists and mutates is not in vain, for now, when he needs it most, his strange body has not failed him. He will be the one Zoanthrope tonight who will be operating at full capacity, who will have a clear mind. He alone of all the others will meet Xion tonight, and tonight he is the only Zoanthrope who stands a chance against the Unborn we witnessed in the graveyard.  
  
Is his form a curse?  
  
The young woman's shock finally passing, Stun says, " Are you all right?"  
  
Shakily, the woman stands up. Stun waits for the inevitable screams for help. He doesn't blame her for her fear. It is something he is used to.  
  
" Yes," she says, her voice relatively calm considering the circumstances. " I'm fine. Thank you... sir?"  
  
Stun, shocked at this almost pleasant response, nods and says, " Sir will do just fine."  
  
The young woman nods to him, and says, " Thanks again. Are you a... Zoanthrope?"  
  
Stun nods, though the question obviously needs no answer.  
  
" Thanks again. I won't forget this." The woman quickly steps out of the alley, over the guards, passing Stun with a grateful look on her face. " I'm going to call the cops," she says, as she passes us on our perches, where we watch and record, " so you might want to leave."  
  
He nods, surprised at her courtesy. She is the first person he has ever had a chance to talk to since taking up his new job as roaming hero, and the kindness and thanks surprise him. He had told himself countless times at the start that they would hate him, that no matter what he did, they would always fear and hate him. The very humaneness of her response humbles him. " Thank you," he says to her, and before he can see the little smile that appears on her face he turns and leaps into the sky, his strength carrying him far above the streets and back to the rooftops he has just left.   
  
He begins running along them, feeling better than he has in years, his hope in humanity not alive yet but beginning to stir again, like the twitching of a giant about to awaken. We fly with him, our own faith in humanity supported by what has just transpired, but when he turns east and begins running across the rooftops there, we continue straight. Stun's tale is central to what will unfold tonight, for he alone of all the others will encounter Xion as he is now. But that will occur later. For now, we are heading to the great mansion that sits by itself on an acre lot (a huge space in this cramped city), a great mansion that is home to a man who used to be called "The Great Mercenary" and is now a UN senator. To his enemies, he was known as the Lion's Fang; to his friends, he is Alan Gado, or just Gado, as he prefers. His home is our next stop, so, silent as the wind, we fly onward.  
  
- I'm dying to put this up, so Chapter 2 will come up later, although this will STILL be a one-shot, unless you reviewers say otherwise. See you all later. 


	2. Sweet Dreams

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN BLOODY ROAR OR ANY CHARACTERS THEREOF. DUE TO THE FACT THAT I DON'T FEEL LIKE WRITING THIS EVERY TIME I START A CHAPTER, I WILL MAKE THIS LEGALLY BINDING TO THE FANFIC AS A WHOLE. SO, LET ME REPEAT. I DO NOT OWN BLOODY ROAR OR ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY CONNECTED TO IT- CHARACTERS, TRADEMARKS, NONE OF IT BELONGS TO ME. I'M NOT MAKING ANY PROFITS OFF THIS, UNLESS MY READERS DECIDE TO SEND ME MONETARY DONATIONS FOR THE BEAUTY OF THIS WORK (HINT, HINT), AND SINCE I DO NOT CONTROL GIFT-GIVING, I CANNOT BE HELD LEGALLY BINDING FOR IT, AND HENCE, MY CLAIMS OF MAKING NO PROFITS OFF THIS IS UPHELD. THAT'S FOR ALL THE *MILLIONS* OF LAWYERS (NOTE SARCASM) WHO WILL BE READING THIS.  
  
[]- Indicates thought. This holds for the entire fanfic too.  
  
* *- Indicates italics, word emphasis, foreign language, and anything else I may require. Counts for the whole fanfic.  
  
Well, folks, it's me again. I've gotten just two reviews for this, and I'm blaming all of it on my horrible summary. So, I'm going to make a story out of this... but don't expect many updates. The writing style is very, very different from what I usually do, so updates will occur about half as frequently as my other stories. It's hard to switch, mentally and artistically, from one train of thought to another.  
  
I won't waste any more time on these blasted author's notes, seeing as how there's not much to write about, besides a big thank-you to my two reviewers. And, of course, a " Me stupid!" note to put in, seeing as how Tiger5913 pointed out that it's *ALICE* who's adopted, not Uriko. Sorry about that- I'll fix it in later chapters. Kudos to IODAC and Tiger5913 for reviewing. At least somebody loves me... (sniffle)   
  
With that finished, it is now...  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter 2  
  
Sweet Dreams  
  
Mansion de Leo, Tokyo, Japan. 10:46, Night of the Mark.  
  
It has been a few minutes since we left Stun, and since then we have been watching the city below us. We aren't very high up now, just skimming the rooftops, and so we get the best of both worlds, the bird's-eye view that beggars the mind, and the close-up view that shows us life in the city at it's best and worst. We have seen strange sights tonight, and if they have failed to make us believe that something is wrong in this city, then what lies ahead will definitely convince us. We're heading to the house of Alan Gado, where he lives with his newly-found daughter, Jane Gado, better known as "Shina" by the mercenaries whose world she's inhabited all her life. Just as her father, Alan, is better known as the "Great Mercenary" by them. He prefers to be called Gado by his friends, and though he will never see us, we are his friends; those of us who stand in the rain and fight the coming of the night, we are all friends no matter where we are or whether we ever see each other or not. So we shall call him Gado, in deference to his wishes.  
  
Gado and his daughter are both Zoanthropes (interestingly, both are felines, he a lion and she a leopard) and both have been mercenaries for most of their lives; but that's where the similarities end. Both have lived in the harsh world of mercenaries and money, and have lived (and still do) in the even harsher world of Zoanthropes, but they have drawn entirely different viewpoints on their experiences.  
  
Gado is an honorable man, the consummate soldier, and was known in his mercenary days as a man who would not betray his employer no matter what offer the enemy made. He would die for his friends, stand fast for them in the worst times, and never give up. He has always viewed the world as a harsh place, but finds that in that very harshness, life holds its value. If life was not harsh, if it was easy to be a good and honorable person in this world, then Good and honor would mean nothing. He is a man whose personal motto might be summed up as " Good things are worth fighting for,", and he holds to his ideals no matter what. As a UN Senator, he brings his considerable weight with certain governments (some of which he helped to put into power in the first place) to the issue of Zoanthrope rights. His fellow UN members think he's human, so they have no idea why he's so adamant about the issue. Even those motions which would have a positive effect on other issues are rejected by him if they counter Zoanthrope rights. Currently, only four countries in the world- Spain, England, Russia, and the United States- grant even limited citizenship rights to Zoanthropes, and of those countries, only Spain and America have granted full rights to Zoanthropes. Gado is working as hard as he can to change this bleak outlook for Zoanthropes, and that is a notion that should cheer us all. The work is hard, but that just makes him fight all the harder.  
  
Jane Gado is an entirely different story. Born to an American mercenary Gado had met in South America on a mission there (the pills her mother had been taking had apparently failed to work that weekend), Shina had been raised by her mother's mercenary group, the Cavaliers, in a world where human life had a price and courage was nothing more than a joke. Unlike Gado, who had only offered his services to causes he considered noble (which sometimes left his purse empty, though that was a small price to pay for a clean conscience), the Cavaliers had offered to fight for anyone with the money, and often switched sides when enough cash was offered. Young Jane had no choice but to go with them. Once she'd reached the age of eight, they'd put her to work cleaning up their mobile headquarters (a ship named "Shit Floats" by some wit among the Cavaliers), and at fifteen, she had killed her first enemy soldier. By eighteen, she'd had quite a reputation in the world of mercenaries, and a nickname she'd been tagged with by the other Cavaliers, " Shina", had become her preferred alias.   
  
She'd left the Cavaliers soon after her eighteenth birthday, with few fond goodbyes said on either side, and became a bounty hunter, tracking and capturing (or killing, depending on the mission) public menaces, serial killers, rapists, anyone with a bounty on their head. For two years she'd lived in Japan, and she'd never seen anything but the harsher side of life. The evil she saw everywhere made her both paranoid of others and a loner, and she sought refuge in the bottle, that age old double-edged sword. When she drank, she got careless- but when she drank, she felt the cold inside her melt away for a few precious minutes. For that, a little sloppiness was acceptable. Sometimes, in her darker moments, she almost wished that sloppiness would cost her her life. It was worthless to her, and she saw nothing in the world. She found herself drawn to the ocean, to the beach, and she would sometimes stand on a promontory over the beach near her house in Japan, just watching the waves. Over and over again, never ceasing in their monotonous pounding of the surf, the waves were part of a vast, watery machine which cared not for the life inside itself, which had no sentience or mind of it's own, but simply acted as the inane, idiot forces that ruled it demanded. There was no romance in it, no significance, nothing to indicate that life had any worth, that anything had worth. She believed she'd found out a key truth to life, that, to quote Macbeth, " Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Endless rhythms, meaningless grace. That was life to her. She's never read any of Hemingway's work, but the conclusions we can draw from this brief account of her life lead us to the rather disturbing idea that she and a suicidal madman who wrote his frenzied thoughts in a notebook (before blowing his brains out, anyway) have far too much in common.  
  
A few days after her twenty-first birthday, she checked her mailbox (she only subscribed to a few mercenary magazines, along with a firearms catalog she received twice a year) and found, very much to her surprise, a letter from her mother. Not quite knowing what to expect, she'd opened it and found out why she was getting a letter from her mother after all these years. Shina's mother had been in South America, almost in the same spot where she and Gado had met, and the memory had called forth an image of her daughter, who she had not seen in three years. The realization had been jarring, even shocking, to her mother, and when she'd checked the calendar she'd found that Shina's birthday was a week off. Her mother had spent all that week trying to find out where Shina lived, and when her contacts had finally found her, she'd written this letter and sent it to her. The letter used to occupy a drawer by itself in Shina's work desk when she lived alone, and now that she lives with her real father it stays in a drawer in her nightstand. The contents of the letter go like this:  
  
My daughter,  
  
I have not been any kind of mother to you. I've raised you in my world, and that's not fair to a child, to be thrust suddenly into a world of mercenaries. You've grown cold, your feelings dulled. I never meant for that to happen, and this plea will fall on deaf ears, but I must say it. I was young back then. I knew nothing. I grow old now, and my mind begins to turn back the hands of time, and as it does I see to my horror all I have done wrong. But all that would not matter if I had raised you right. As things stand, I did not, and failed at the most important mission in my life. It means nothing, but I feel the deepest regret I have ever known, a regret that tears me apart. Sorrow is slowly killing me, sorrow over what I've done over the years, to others and to myself, but it is what I've done to you that hurts me most.  
  
I'm sorry.  
  
Those two words are just dust in the wind, I know. The woman who left us three years ago was not a woman who would have cared about them, and though I do not know how much has changed, I suspect and fear that your heart has not. You were a woman who cared about nothing, not even herself, and that is the worst of it. One who cares about nothing is worse than one who hates everything, because at least the hater has something to feel.  
  
It's all my fault.  
  
I can do nothing to help you now, my daughter. You've moved beyond me, and all the life you've lived outside me, a life you lived outside me even when you lived with me, have just made you harder and harder to reach. You were always quiet, Shina, independent, not asking for favors and giving none. Maybe because you knew I wouldn't give you any, nor receive anything you gave.  
  
There is but one thing left to do, and though it does nothing to fulfill the obligation of being a mother, it does make the ache in my heart ease a little. I can tell you who your real father is. I have even found out where he lives, and you are in luck. He is in Japan right now, north of where you currently live.  
  
His name is Alan Gado, also known as the "Great Mercenary". It was bad in Peru, and we both needed someone to hold. I do not possess the words necessary to tell you what it was like, but he does. That's what originally attracted me to him, that very aura of intelligence, of wit.  
  
I'm sorry.  
  
Your mother,  
  
Anneke Roan  
  
The letter had prompted Shina to move out of her comfortable existence and head north, to find her father. Which proved to be her undoing. Her sources allowed her to find her father rather easily, near a dock in Japan, where he was trying to sniff out a renegade scientist named Busuzima. He'd recently met a scientist named Stephen (who we've met, too, though he now calls himself Stun), who happened to know Busuzima. The two had been working together, on a bioengineering project, but Busuzima had recently stolen some research materials from their lab. Stephen had went to Gado for help, and Jane had knocked on the front door while the two were discussing what to do about it. When she'd entered, her first words (words she had neither planned nor rehearsed; she was unprepared for the encounter and knew it, and knew as well that trying to plan would simply make her look foolish when the time came) had been simple, profound, and heartfelt, the first words she'd said in a long time that pulled any kind of emotion from her.  
  
" Father, I'm here."  
  
Gado had stared at her for a moment, then said, " What?" He was quite calm, considering what Shina had just said to him.  
  
" I'm your daughter," she said, and in her head she was running through all she knew about her mother, about the time in Peru. " My mother told me about you two days ago."  
  
" Maybe you'd better come in," Gado had said, clearly confused but gentlemanly nonetheless.  
  
" But what about?.." Stephen had begun.  
  
" Hold on for a minute," Gado had said, not unkindly. " A young woman has just popped up at my door and called me Father. I do believe I'm entitled to at least a few minutes to sort this out."  
  
Stephen had nodded and stepped back. The room and the house itself are very blurry in Shina's mind, and for good reason; she was knocked out soon after entering. Hard raps on the head don't improve memory in the best situations, and she had not been in the house for more than a few minutes before the windows busted in and Busuzima's paid goons assaulted them. We cannot travel through time, but we can assume that the fight didn't last long. Shina had been knocked unconscious, and when she awoke she was strapped to an operating table, nude, with Busuzima grinning down at her, his face a twisted mask of lechery.  
  
But let's leave that memory off for now, shall we? We have reached the mansion, and now is not a time to remember the past. That time will come, and soon- but it will not be tonight.  
  
The house is lit up in two rooms, one a library on the ground floor to our right, the second a bedroom on the second floor to our left. We slip into the bedroom through a convenient crack in the windows, and hear a Japanese newscaster talking about recent Zoanthrope activities in Africa and Europe. Gado's up in his room, watching the late news and amusing himself by abusing a stress ball. He keeps a great deal of them in his house, and scraps of the ones he busts daily fill the trash can beside his bed. He has found, much to his chagrin, that being a UN official is far more stressful than being a mercenary. After all, as a mercenary, he usually ended up killing anyone that annoyed him; in the UN, such activities are frowned upon, so he resorts to stress balls. The poor, beleagured red ball in his right hand isn't going to last much longer; it's already begun to emit a terminal wheeze when he squeezes it, and will soon go out with one last gasp, whereupon Gado will dump it's remains into the trash can and choose another stress ball out of the drawer in his nightstand, where dozens lie in wait, trembling over the idea that the enormous hand may reach in and pick them up next.  
  
We move into the upper hallway through the crack under the door, leaving behind the persecuted stress balls, and glance around at the white walls about us. The pictures on the wall aren't family pictures of any kind, but rather trophy pictures from Gado's exploits. In one picture, he is towering over two small Mexican mercenaries he met in South America, his huge arms thrown over their shoulders, laughing at a dirty joke one of them told. In another, he stands in a mercenary pose, rifle aimed and ready, as six laughing African mercenaries stand nearby, striking poses of their own. Soon after this, four of the six men in the picture died, in a hellish firestorm that completely engulfed the small village they'd been staying in. Gado keeps the photograph as a way of remembering them.  
  
We travel down the stairs, sobering war photos (in which everyone seems to be smiling or laughing; the old police adage that " If we didn't laugh, we'd cry" applies to soldiers as well, it seems) weighing down our mood and making us serious in heart and mind, and notice the fine carpet. It is light purple, a color Gado hates but has never said anything about. He hired a famous interior decorator to fashion the inside of his house, and though he thought the man was insane (who in the world would want to have purple carpets, for God's sake?), he hadn't dared to make any changes to the home after the decorator had finished and went home, for fear of removing his home from the realm of good taste. Gado has no idea how to properly decorate a home, having never had one until now, and so trusts to the strange decorator's designs.  
  
The stairs lead into a great room, the lobby of this mansion. The carpet ends at the bottom of the staircase, as the designer preferred the more elegant touch of marble flooring here in the entry hall. It works; whatever his failures in choosing carpet, the man does know how to make an impressive great hall. Pillars of marble (well, it's really marble coated steel, but it's appearances that count, right?) jut out of the ground, rising upwards, supporting the second and third floors with their considerable strength. Paintings and expensive rugs line the walls, and a great set of double-doors leads to the outside world. But we aren't going out just yet; we need to find Shina first, before we can continue our little journey. Much as Uriko, right now, is just beginning to feel pain in her lower back (right where, later tonight, a Crest will appear), so is Shina feeling pain over her left chest. We need to see just what these things are, and what they are doing to the Zoanthropes we know so well. We glide, ever silent, through the lobby and into a side door, where inside, Shina is trying to work off some of her frustration on something a little bigger than a stress ball. This area is the gym, and from the pounding noises coming from within, we can assume that some poor punching bag is being abused at the moment. Shina and Gado are remarkably alike, sometimes.  
  
We glide in, and get our first good glimpse of the leopard Zoanthrope. She is currently wearing her training gear, which is her own personal attempt to remove clothing out of the equation completely. Shina has a very violent fighting style, and nothing gets on her nerves like having loose clothing flying all over the place. So, instead of a more traditional karate gi, she favors a form-fitting tank top, shorts, and socks. The resultant look is less a woman trying to train than a woman in her undergarments; when her friend Long (who we will meet later on tonight) came to train with her one night, the straight-laced Chinese gentleman blushed so furiously and felt so embarrassed that he couldn't spar with her at all until she slipped into a karate gi. Most people would have found it funny, but Shina's sense of humor (like much else about her) is dead. Dead and buried, in some dark place in her mind, where she has kept so much of herself locked away. Shina is young in body, but old in soul.  
  
At the moment, as we gather about her like silent shadows, we see that something isn't staying dead in Shina's mind, something that's alive and kicking. She's in a great deal of physical pain now, and it shows in the snarl of her mouth, and the unconscious grimace she keeps on her face. It also shows in how hard she's hitting the punching bag; she's pounding it with everything she's got, and the frayed fabric of it's outer lining is starting to go. Before long, like one of the many stress balls Gado has squeezed into oblivion over the years, this canvas will rip open and pour out it's load of sand onto the mat on the floor of the gym.  
  
Before managing this feat of athletics, however, Shina stops and grabs the battered bag with her left hand, chest heaving from both exertion and pain. Her right hand clasps a spot above her left breast, trying to massage away the pain there. Her teeth are bared in a snarl, directed at whatever invisible enemy is causing her this pain, maybe. She tries to calm herself, but the pain in her chest is like nothing she's ever felt before. She better be glad of that; this is not ordinary physical pain, but a spiritual pain, a wound on the soul, the pain only demons can cause. To be more specific, the pain the demon we saw in the graveyard tonight can cause, as it stands on a rooftop far above Tokyo's streets, chanting and gurgling and gnashing and raving with the foul language of it's kind, as a great stone Tabula begins to form from the air...   
  
But that is an issue we will deal with when the time comes. At the moment, we must watch. And as we watch, we move closer to the struggling Zoanthrope, gazing in wonder at the spot her hand clutches, for claw marks are beginning to form there, marks that appear to come from inside the flesh. But, unlike natural claw marks which have a symmetry, these things are ragged, crossing each other at points, marks no natural thing could have made. This is our first sighting of a Crest. It will not be our last.  
  
We begin to drift slowly backwards as Shina struggles to keep control of herself. We have seen here what needed to be seen- we must move on. Time grows short, and there is so very much to see tonight. We exist out a handy window, slipping into and through it's cracks like drops of water, and fly off into the night.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Park in Tokyo, four blocks from Gado's mansion. 11:13.  
  
We've flown far tonight, and have farther to fly still, so it's refreshing to see trees and greenery in this city of glass and steel. Inside, enjoying himself in his beast form, our next subject has stopped for a rest. We fly down, through the trees in this small, wooded park, and hear panting noises, like a dog makes. By the sound of them, these pants come from a very big dog- or a wolf.  
  
As we pass the canopy and enter the forest proper, we see the source of the pants. Crouching down, one clawed fist on the ground to support his body, happily panting from exertion, Yugo Ohgami rests after finishing his nightly run through the woods. They aren't real woods, of course, not the kind of woods where you can run for miles and see nothing but trees, where the scent of gasoline and technology is far away, but they are a nice break in scenery from the modern constructions everywhere else in Tokyo. Yugo's heart lies here, in woods and forests, and did so even before he became a wolf Zoanthrope. He sometimes wonders if the Zoanthrope's beast forms are actually reflections of their inner selves. With all he's seen, he thinks that maybe that's so.  
  
Yugo pants faster, wanting to rid himself of body heat before moving on. The one problem with being a wolf Zoanthrope was that it took forever to cool down. Wolf Zoanthropes, like their animal counterparts, apparently had no sweat glands, and had to sweat with their tongues to get rid of body heat. Combined with their larger form, that translated into a lot of panting. Sometimes, after a particularly good run when he's not paying attention, Yugo is sometimes struck forcefully by the amount of heat in his body, feeling dizzy, disoriented, weak. It's not a good way to feel.  
  
Of course, the heat he generates does have it's uses. In the middle of battle, making one's fists suddenly light up with flame has quite an effect on whoever you're fighting. But at the moment, it was nothing more than a nuisance.  
  
Feeling the great heat built up around him slack off a little, Yugo turns and begins walking through the woods. As he does, we notice the leather jacket he's wearing, one that says " HARLEY-DAVIDSON" on the back (Yugo is a big fan of the American motorcycle company), and the leather pants he wears. Both are a size too big for Yugo in his human form, but fit him just fine in beast form. He lopes along easily, not going on all fours but going in a crouched over state, unconsciously sniffing the air for interesting scents. He smells something strange in the air to the north, and stops to lift his nose and test for it in a higher and clearer stream of air, but it's gone before he can find it. He snorts- it was not a particularly pleasant smell- and forgets about it. Something dead, he tells himself, though he doesn't quite believe that. He's had the misfortune to smell dead things before, and he only thinks of them because this scent is like that... but it's not quite that smell. It's deeper, somehow, a smell of something that's rotted to the point that death is clean by comparison.   
  
Yugo begins heading for home, hoping that his little brother cooked a late dinner. Kenji is the ultimate night owl, someone who apparently needs no sleep whatsoever, and more often than not Yugo has come home from his nightly runs to find him eating noodles or reading a book on politics and public speaking. Kenji greatly admires Gado for his fierce defense of Zoanthropes to the UN, and is hoping to become a public speaker himself. First, though, he has to get over his shyness in public. His defense is to shut up, to become silent and almost invisible, and much like the mole his beast form is based on, dig himself a convenient hole to hide in. Kenji is trying to get over his shyness, and his new girlfriend is helping, but it's still going to take some work to get him to talk before twenty people, much less the thousands he wants to reach out to.  
  
Thinking of Uriko Nonomura, Yugo grins, the effect more terrifying than endearing in his beast form. Uriko is the exact opposite of Kenji, an outgoing, over-exuberant extrovert who fits into every crowd she ever walks into. The two's first meeting had been, like the first meetings of most of the Tylon Zoanthropes (as those who had been formed by that branch of Bioganics Inc. were known), rather bad; Kenji had been Bakuryu at that time, possessed of extreme cunning and evil, and he'd tried his best to kill Uriko. She'd managed to best him, her odd half-beast form granting her a speed he couldn't match, and she'd knocked him into a handy wall. The stunned mole Zoanthrope had been too dazed to move when a steel girder fell on him, knocking him out, and that had been the point where Yugo had found him. The boy had reverted to his normal state, and Yugo had lifted the girder off him and saved him. He still doesn't know why he did it; he'd just listened to that little voice in his head that told him what was right. He's never regretted saving Kenji, even when Kenji lost his mind for a while when Busuzima figured out how to awaken the sleeping monstrosity named Bakuryu in him. Yugo had fought him in those days, and it had been a hard fight- he hadn't wanted to harm Kenji, but Bakuryu was more than happy to kill him...  
  
He shakes his head, clearing away those thoughts. [ That's all in the past now,] he thinks to himself, [ and Bakuryu is gone. Kenji is just Kenji now.] He knows nothing about the battle raging in his adopted brother's soul at this moment, knows nothing about the fact that Bakuryu is alive and well in Kenji's mind, a hellish counterpart to him, a black tide that threatens to engulf him if he lets his guard down.  
  
Yugo heads home, and we flap our wings to get there ahead of him. We aim for a house a block away, a house where Kenji even now picks up the knife with which he will take his own life...  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Ohgami household, one block from Nonomura's house, 11:30.  
  
We fly fast, my friends, far faster than Yugo is moving now. If he had any idea what was happening in his house at this very moment, he would no doubt put our speed to shame, dropping to all fours, running to beat the devil. Which, in a very real sense, he would be.  
  
The house bears a striking resemblance to the Nonomura household, brick walls and all, but we have no time now to appreciate it- we must watch and record, and what is happening now is of the utmost importance. All Zoanthropes feel the Crest marring their skin, but Kenji feels it marring his soul. Feels it reaching out, stretching, tearing, calling...  
  
To that dark place in him where Bakuryu resides.  
  
We pass through cracks in the door and window, hurrying now, and come inside just in time to watch Kenji take the knife in his right hand and lift it upwards. It gleams dully in the electric gaze of the light in the ceiling, a paring knife, changed in our view from a cooking utensil to a thing of portent. It gleams, and we shiver on our perches, feeling some great weight flowing out from the knife, the great mystery of life and death perched on it's edge. A mystery that Kenji may well finish exploring tonight.  
  
He looks at it, and in his face we see the tortured, conflicting thoughts of someone who has lived far beyond his years. He is a boy on the threshold of being a man, and in him we see some physical traits of the man he would be- short of stature but lengthy of limb, thin but handsome face, hair that would resist the efforts of the greatest hairdressers in the world- but there is nothing in him to indicate the type of man he would become. Some people wear their souls on their sleeves, but Kenji is as unreadable and dark as the tunnels of his mole counterpart.  
  
He gazes at the knife, and we are able (in our ascendant state) to know what he is thinking. And what thoughts they are.  
  
[ Oh, will the little boy take the easy way out?]  
  
A harsh tone, guttural, black as the foulest abyss.  
  
[ Will you simply end it here? Is it because you fear you can't beat me? Or...  
  
Is it because you KNOW it, Kenji Ohgami! Because you know that, in the end, I'm too powerful! That in the end, I'll be back. Yugo doesn't know about me. Alice doesn't know about me. Even sweet, precious Uriko doesn't know about me. But you do, don't you? You KNOW!]  
  
This is Bakuryu, the voice of Kenji's other half, the monster that lives in his soul. Kenji has had a harsh life, and even the greatest minds will crack under enough pressure. A child's mind is even more fragile, and when placed under the hands of Busuzima...  
  
Snap.  
  
[ Maybe I can't stop you from eventually returning,] Kenji thinks, his mental voice a softer, sadder counterpoint to Bakuryu's monstrous syllables, [ but I can kill you now. I can end it here.]  
  
[ You don't have the guts!] Laughter, harsh, barking.  
  
[ Just try me,] Kenji thinks.  
  
Bakuryu responds to this with more laughter, and as he laughs, Kenji looks around the room. He wants to remember this place. It was his home, the only place where love, that oft-spoken of thing in poetry and books, that faraway dream he had never touched, ever graced him with it's presence. He gazes around, each thing bringing up a memory of good times, better times. Tears fill his eyes as he gazes about himself.  
  
On the TV, where he has sometimes helped Yugo in his boxing career by pointing out mistakes to him on replays of his matches, sit two small pictures, each holding their own special significance to him. One is of Yugo, decked out in a tuxedo, grinning as he and Alice pose for a picture. This was shot at a ball Gado held at his mansion a year ago, and is Yugo's favorite picture. He claims it's the only one in which he actually looks like he has more than shit for brains, and so it occupies a proud place on the TV. To Kenji, the smiles of both Alice and Yugo are condemning, almost physically painful to him, and he blinks as he gazes at them, twin tears falling from his eyes.  
  
[ I'm sorry,] he thinks, trying to put everything he feels into the two most profound words in any language, [ I'm so sorry. I didn't want to fail you, Yugo. You always believed in me... but I'm not worth it. I was never worth it.]  
  
His gaze follows the pictures, and in one he sees Uriko Nonomura, waving exuberantly at the camera, grin wide and bright. This one hurts too, almost more than the others do, because in it he sees all he might have done, if he was not so weak.  
  
[ Why, Uriko? What do you see in me... what did you see in me? What is there in me, but darkness and the potential for more darkness... Why did you ever become part of my life? Why? Did you want to drag me upwards, from the depths of my pain, drag me upwards to better things? Thank you, Uriko, for showing me just a little of your light... but I will not burden you anymore. You deserve better.]  
  
He continues looking around the room, gazing at the various objects on the walls, feeling the pain of friends who graced him with their presence- Jenny, noble Gado, Long, even cold Shina- and then stops as he comes to the cross hanging on the wall. Yugo is quietly religious, and has an unshakeable faith in the Lord that lets him be as cheerful as he naturally is. Kenji has tried to emulate his brother, but his sins are far too grevious for even God to forgive. What he has done in the past, the lives he's taken and the pain he's caused, are so much that God has turned His face away from him. For such as he, redemption is an impossible dream, Hell the only possible destination.  
  
[ At least in Hell,] he thinks, his entire life slipping away from him, letting himself fall ever closer to the final moments as the hand with the knife touches his wrist, [ my evil will do no more harm.] Bakuryu screams, finally realizing that Kenji means to go through with it.  
  
The knife flashes down, blade dulling as claret spills over it.  
  
Snap.  
  
- Next chapter soon. Please read and review, my friends. 


	3. And It All Falls Down

Hey people. It's been forever, hasn't it? Sorry 'bout that... Tiger probably wants to kill me now :). But, it's here! Chapter 3 of "Night of the Mark!" Kudos to my reviewers- you guys rule.  
  
And now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's...  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter 3  
  
And It All Falls Down  
  
Ohgami household. 11:33 p.m.  
  
For the last three minutes we have been sitting here in this house, shuddering and shaking, flapping our wings and tapping our fingers, waiting for Yugo to come home. We notice, to our growing anxiety, that the pool of blood under Kenji's wrist is quickly growing bigger. He now sits on the floor, legs buckled under him, holding the now-scarlet knife in his left hand, trying to slit his right wrist. But he can't; his hand won't obey his commands anymore. Bakuryu is in him, and the assassin is not going to go down without a fight. Strangely, Bakuryu's ferocious efforts to save himself may well come out all right. Because Kenji's Zoanthrope nature is even now working against him, the wound slowly healing. Had he been in his Beast form, it would be entirely gone by now; in his human form, it is healing, but slowly. Kenji believed, before he picked up the knife, that if he could slit both his wrists, then the blood loss would counter his own natural healing powers. And, of course, he had thought at the time that he could suppress them. Bakuryu has decided otherwise, and the madman is actually performing an act of Good- he is keeping Kenji from killing himself. But all his efforts will be in vain if Kenji can cut his right wrist as well. Even now, Kenji is beginning to feel weak, to feel faint. Maybe it will take just one wrist to kill him.  
  
As we flap our wings and find ourselves reluctantly siding with Bakuryu on this issue, we hear a noise outside. We shift our gaze, and who is this opening the door? Yugo? He has traveled faster than we thought he would. We raise a silent cheer, as Yugo walks in, in human form now, a greeting already forming on his lips. It dies just as quickly as his cheerful mood, his face growing slack with horror. On the floor, Kenji notices him come in, and the bleak look on his young face is almost more than we can bear. It is a look that has in it all the sadness of a much older man. Kenji had not wanted Yugo to see this, to see him in his weakness. Sadness overwhelming him, Kenji loses his grip on consciousness and passes out from blood loss. Bakuryu, shrieking his defiance, goes with him.  
  
Yugo stares for a second longer as Kenji's bleeding form, in a strange and sickening slow-motion tumble, hits the floor. Then, reacting on instinct, his mind completely blank save for one thought ([Kenji!]), he clears the distance between himself and his adopted younger brother with a running leap, diving onto Kenji. His fear and panic granting him strength beyond even his extraordinary limits, he picks Kenji up like a rag doll and cradles him to his chest. Turning in the same motion, he begins running out the door, his mind disoriented, the few thoughts floating back into his conscious disordered, incoherent. He has a vague feeling that Alice will know what to do. It's a thought that is not without basis- she is a nurse, after all- but Yugo knows some very light first aid and has a small kit in his house (a birthday present from Alice). So why does he run to her? As we take wing and slip out of the house with him, these are questions we cannot answer. Yugo himself does not know the answer.  
  
We follow him, flapping our wings as fast as we can, following the Zoanthrope as he runs down the streets towards Alice's house, yelling at the top of his lungs. Lights flicker on, in the houses nearby; a young man running and screaming in the streets is not a common sight in this peaceful neighborhood. A voice yells for "those damn kids" to "shut up"; a second voice wonders what is going on. Yugo ignores them, and so do we. They might as well be on another planet, for all that they affect us.  
  
Yugo runs, hurls himself down the street, and reaches Alice's house far sooner than expected. Kenji has been bleeding the whole way, and droplets of his blood fall like scarlet tears to the pavement below. Kenji moans softly, his tortured subconscious stretching out towards him again. Even to us, his mind is closed; it is impossible to tell, in the storm of thunder and lightning that is his mind, what he is thinking. And that may be for the better. Who knows what memories are his, what lives he's taken? Though we do not share his belief that he is a monster, we can full well understand why he thinks of himself that way.  
  
Yugo rushes up Alice's driveway, and in one fluid motion moves his right hand from Kenji, lifts it, and begins pounding on the door. The same strength that is letting him carry Kenji as if he ways no more than a pound is causing his fist to strike far harder than intended; three blows, like rapidfire shots, pound the wood of the door, leaving indentions and knocking it off it's hinges. Yugo is more than willing to break it down if he must; he has to get to Alice. Before he does so, Uriko jerks the door open, having heard something outside but, being in bed and in that peacefully blurry haze that comes before sleep, she had not recognized it as Yugo. She jerks the door open, and as she opens her mouth to say something, stops dead. She sees Kenji, and clasps a hand to her mouth in horror. She does not realize that Kenji is alive; she sees the blood and his limp form, and in that instant believes he is dead. And it is more than she can bear. She shrieks, and her voice carries far into the night, where it is heard by the being flying above the city on leathern wings, by a long-limbed nightmare who has just finished robbing and killing several drunks in an alley, by a Kenpo master who looks up sharply from the book he has been reading. But those are stories for later on tonight. At the moment, this is what we must watch, what we must record.  
  
Her shriek cuts through the haze and pain in Alice's head. She is coming now, running down the stairs, and upon hearing her sister's cry she shoves the dull pain in the back of her head aside. It still aches, but Alice, through sheer force of will, relegates it to a dark corner of her mind. She clears the bannister of the stairs with a smooth leap.  
  
" Yugo?" she says, and then sees Kenji. " Oh my God," she says, and her eyes widen in surprise and fear. Her nurse training taking over, she runs to Yugo. Yugo looks at her, hoping and praying that Alice knows what to do.  
  
" His wrist..." Yugo chokes out, fear pulsating in his mind. [Oh God,] he thinks. [What are we going to do? He's lost so much blood...]  
  
" Bring him to the table," Alice says, and her voice is completely different now. It is business-like, orderly, the voice of those trained to heal. She runs to the table, and in one swift move knocks off the decorative basket she had placed there. It spins into the floor with a crash. No one notices it. Yugo places Kenji on the table, where he moans and shifts briefly before laying still. Uriko, her mind registering that Kenji is alive, immediately runs for the first aid kit the family keeps in the kitchen. Alice has beaten her to it, however, and so Uriko goes back to the bottom of the table, where she stares at Kenji, her mind a racing whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. Oddly, the thought that occurs to her is how much she never told him. She had never realized until now that she cared for him so much, that her feelings ran so deep. Now she prays that she has not realized what she had just to lose it. We gather about the table, to watch as they try to save this tortured soul's life, and we pray with her.  
  
Alice brings out a tourniquet, and wraps it about Kenji's upper arm. She knows that a tourniquet is really one of the last things you want to do- if held on too long, it will kill the limb it's attached too- but at the moment, she needs to stop the bleeding. She tells Uriko, in her nurse's voice, to call the Japanese equivalent of 911, then returns her attention to the wounded boy before her. It strikes her forcefully how sad he looks, and she wonders why, in all the visits he has paid to their house, she always failed to notice it. She'd known him well, she'd thought; she'd believed that Kenji had healed, that his past held no power over him. Now, in the agonizing clarity of hindsight, she realizes how many times Kenji tried to tell her, to call out to them all.  
  
[ And we never heard him,] she thinks, berating herself internally. [ We never listened.]  
  
But now is not the time for such thoughts. She quickly returns to the nearby first aid kit, bringing out bandages and wraps. The bleeding has slowed greatly, but that is not enough. She must try to stop it fully. She wraps up his wrist as fast and neat as possible, making them with the calm and perfect precision of a nurse who has healed all her life. Perhaps coming here was not merely madness on Yugo's part; someone less well-trained and calm, say, a panicking big brother with only basic first aid skills, may not have been able to do this without losing their cool. We sit anxiously on our perches, awaiting the sirens that will herald the arrival of the hospital men.  
  
And soon, within minutes of Uriko's call, they come. Alice lives near the hospital where she works, and is one of the most well-liked people on the staff. As soon as the operator heard Uriko's frantic, desperate call, the hospital put it's best team out. And now their sirens, those high-pitched calls of healing, are audible, and the flashing lights that herald ambulances the world over can be seen flashing in the windows. Before the ambulance even stops, the medical team is already out and moving. They are coming in, with a stretcher and blood transfusions ready to be put into use. Kenji, though he had taken a step over the abyss, has been allowed to draw his foot back.  
  
And with his life now in good hands and soon to recover (but one must ask oneself: when, if ever, will his soul heal?), our part here is done. This is not our last visit to the respective families of Nonomura and Ohgami, but when we see them again it will be closer to the strange morn that will herald the change of so much in this world. Far closer.  
  
We take wing and, with the flashing lights of the ambulance brightening our way, we fly.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Bar in Tokyo. Two blocks away. 11:40 p.m.  
  
We fly over the streets, and soon we find ourselves over a small bar, where Japanese men and women slake their thirsts with sake or, more commonly, beer. Tonight, however, a far more dangerous customer than the usual miscreants that inhabit this place has just fulfilled his thirst. His happens to be a rare taste. For this being hungers for blood.  
  
The horror wipes his chin, where one of the drunks he has just killed managed to get in a lucky strike before going down under a rain of brutal blows. The punch didn't really hurt, but the principle of the thing gets to him. A master scientist and fighter like himself should be able to beat on any number of drunks without getting struck. He shakes his head slowly, long tongue lolling out like some strange tourist leaning out the window of a bus to take in the sights. It hangs there, saliva dribbling down it slowly, as he pants and thinks. The strains of a song (and what is it but "One Headlight", by the Wallflowers, the self-same American song that Xion was just so lately thinking about) float in the air around us from the bar. The figure ignores it.  
  
The lanky creature before us is Busuzima. He is, in his own way, a figure of respect, for he helped invent the Zoanthrope process, and that act, for good or ill, changed the world. And yet what he is- what he *really* is- is so dark and horrendous that few men would grant him a place of honor in their hearts. Yugo, in those few moments when he feels thoughtful and reflective, wonders often why Busuzima is this way. What must be in his past, to make him the way he is. As we flap down into the alley to study this monster, we peer into his mind, to answer that question Yugo asks himself.  
  
And what we see profoundly disturbs us. For there is nothing. Nothing at all. No rape, no abuse, no broken home, no draconian parents to rebel against, nothing. Not even the idle selfishness born of riches, for Busuzima's parents were middle class, and they were Buddhists, ruling out a dark religion. There is not even the smallest hint of the sadistic animal he would become, and the worst part of all is that Busuzima fondly recalls all of his childhood. He sees it as a peaceful time before his "rising", as he terms it (that nightmare period when he subjected so many innocent souls to his experiments), and recalls no great trauma at all. Peering deeper than even he can go, into the depths of the subconscious where all memory and past life stands suspended in a moment, we still see nothing. No animal torture, no "problems" in school, nothing and nada.  
  
And that may be the most terrifying fact of all. That Busuzima, who by all natural law should be a normal, stable Buddhist scientist, could willfully choose to be a monster. All souls are allowed to choose what path they shall travel, but there is almost always something that makes them choose the road they do. But in Busuzima's life, nothing. His love of torture and evil is not a random quirk or twitch of some previously unknown disease, but rather a willful choice he made. He recalls that moment with special fondness. He was barely a year into college when he made his choice, when he killed a fellow student for a pitifully small amount of money (barely 50 yen) and dumped the body into a river. And he has never looked back since.  
  
And maybe that is why Busuzima, more than any other villain we can think of, is terrifying. Because he made a conscious choice. No madness marks him (for the insane act he puts on in public and in combat is but another deception by him, a skillful and cunning trick made to fool others) and so he has no internal weakness, no slipped gears that will eventually collide and bring him down. If nothing brings him down from the outside, he will quite cheerfully keep on ticking until his death, which will probably come in his slumber. His beast form is that of a Chameleon, and it is more than fitting- it is just. Busuzima has done nothing but deceive others his whole life past that hellish choice, tricking his college buddies into thinking he was just another one of the guys when in reality he was far from it; tricking his parents into sending him more money than he needed so he could buy from the drug dealers about his school; deceiving the drug dealers into thinking he was a junkie when he was turning around and selling the opium and hash for far more money than he'd spent to get them. Deceit, deception, lies. And so his beast form is all trickery and illusion.  
  
As we watch, he hunkers down on his long legs and swiftly rifles through the contents of the drunk's pockets. Nabbing a little yen to take with him, he quickly moves over and performs the same search on the other two drunks he has killed tonight. The search comes up with no interesting items other than yen, so Busuzima quickly throws them into a nearby Dumpster. He isn't worried about fingerprints, for he has none (a strange side-effect of his change into a Zoanthrope), and what few clues DNA might provide will be useless. The Tokyo Police have no records of his DNA, and in fact have no records of his existence at all. In addition to his formidable skills in the area of bioengineering, he is a master hacker.  
  
He stalks off, heading along the city, scratching at a strangely itchy place on the back of his left hand. Later tonight, as he continues to walk the city streets in search of easy targets to rob and slay, this itchy feeling will fully flesh out into a Crest, a perfect set of three jagged slashes. Unlike the other Zoanthropes, it causes him no pain, but a sort of delirious pleasure. A servant of evil like himself does not fear the demon powers of the Tabula. Why should he? They are one and the same.  
  
And so, completely unknowing, Busuzima is drafted into the service of the creature possessing Xion. And the service of that creature's master.  
  
We begin to lift off as Busuzima walks out into the streets of cold, dark Tokyo, and the wind whips through the alley as if in mockery of the murders committed here. And though we are immune to the effects of this wind, we shiver nonetheless.  
  
Let us take wing and fly.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Night Sky over Tokyo. 11:53 p.m.  
  
It has taken us a little time to find our next subject, but that is all right. There is a long way to go before tonight is over, and we have time to kill. The creature above us is flying as well, though her flight is more jerky and physically demanding than ours. After all, a far greater force than the mere pressure of air on wing surface is lifting us up.  
  
The figure is one that would not look out of place on one of the great stone cathedrals of Western Europe. Large ears, sharp fangs, wings and talons all make this flying figure a being out of nightmare, a gargoyle come to life. It is not a very bright night, or the creature before us would never have attempted this flight. Still, she wonders if she could have restrained herself even if she wanted to.  
  
Jenny flies above us, a former spy turned into stalwart defender of Zoanthropes the world over. Or so she likes to think. In truth, she is less a defender herself and more a supporter, a crutch that Gado leans on when the old man feels lost or lonely or tired. Jenny is greatly attracted to Gado, but does not know whether it is love or not. She has never really believed in love, but never thought it did not exist either. It was in an "open" file, one she can neither prove or disprove based on what information she has. Not that there's much evidence for either case in her files.  
  
Jenny once worked as a spy, not belonging to any one organization but hiring herself out as time and needs dictated. Her most fateful mission as a spy had come close to being her last, for Busuzima had almost killed her when he had found out who she was working for and why. Bioganics Inc., the company that had supported the Zoanthrope projects all throughout the world, had hired her to spy on Busuzima and see what he was doing in Japan. When Busuzima found out, he'd restrained his initial urge to kill her and instead decided to exact an even more terrible tribute from her. He'd changed her DNA around, spliced her genes, and made her a Zoanthrope. A gift that was part blessing, part curse. Jenny often jokes with Stun (her best friend) that it depended on one's state of mind. If happy, a blessing. If sad, a curse.  
  
At the moment it is a blessing, for though flying is one of the most physically demanding things she does as a Zoanthrope, it is also the most rewarding. The feeling of flying over the city, high above it all, is a feeling so far beyond anything she has ever known (better than any food or sex or experience she has ever had in her human life) that she is always at a loss for words when trying to describe it. Stun, who can fly as well (although only for short distances and heights) understands part of it, but no one could possibly understand all of it. It is this very feeling of freedom, of solemn things and great things, of expectation, that she has searched for her entire life. It was in search of this feeling that she had became a freelance spy, and she did feel some of this excitement back then, but only in flight does it become pure and free, dancing alone and independent of her. In flight, nothing else matters, and she feels herself close to some great mystery. What it is, and whether she wants to understand it or not, are questions she will not allow herself to ask. It just was. Any questioning of it might lead to a lessening of that great mystery. For that's the thrill of mysteries, isn't it? The ability to write your own tales and stories, to dream...  
  
We pull up even with her, floating alongside her, more silent than ghosts and watchful as we must always be. We feel part of the mystery of flying, of the aura this act gives off, and for a few moments we leave her thoughts alone. We peer below us, to see what the city we have been flying through looks like from this vantage point. It seems to be made of light and dark, placed together like the squares of a chessboard, and for some reason this imagery sticks. It takes everything we have seen and learned tonight, even the things that were just suggested, and binds them all together.  
  
We fly over darkness.  
  
Kenji's attempted suicide.  
  
We fly over light.  
  
Alice's skill in crisis.  
  
Darkness.  
  
Busuzima's murders.  
  
Light.  
  
Stun's heroism.  
  
Darkness.  
  
Xion.  
  
Light.  
  
Yugo.  
  
Maybe this place is just a chessboard, and the pieces are beginning to fall in place. Everything we have seen has shown itself on opposite sides. One stands against another. And maybe that's what all this night is really about: taking sides.  
  
Down below us, further reinforcing the idea of a chess board, Stun stands in a square of light. Around him, all is darkness, but where he stands, the faint glow of a street lamp illuminates his form on the rooftops. He is crouched down on the edge of the rooftop, gazing into the almost entirely empty street below. A few humans pass, mostly couples out for a nightly stroll, and none glance up and notice their strange protector watching over them. From this high up, the most identifiable feature on him is his scarf, billowing out behind him and flapping in the wind.  
  
Jenny lets out a high-pitched cry, a sound far too high for human ears, but Stun can hear her, and he glances up at his friend. Standing up and strolling into the middle of the rooftop, he watches Jenny float down slowly and land near him. There is little danger of being seen; this area is part of a block of industrial buildings, and none of the buildings about this one have easy access to their rooftops that might lead unsuspecting humans to happen upon them. Still, just to be safe, they step out of the light and into the more comfortable darkness of night. We fly down and perch so that we may listen to what these two old friends have to say.  
  
" Hey, Vampirella. Nice night for flying?"  
  
Jenny snorts at Stun's affectionate nickname for her and nods her head. She says, in a voice slightly muffled by her two large front fangs (Busuzima gave her the DNA of a vampire bat just to see a "real" vampire for once), " Yes. Wind's just right- it's only blowing down here, in the lower atmosphere. Up there, it's still and quiet." She tilts her head back, looking up into the sky and thinking. Unconsciously, she has crossed her wings in front of her. In her beast form, she has very little fur, and she has always felt rather immodest when in beast form. Stun, who thinks she looks like she's wearing a fur bikini in beast form, has politely never said anything about it.  
  
" Good." Stun thinks for a moment, then says, " Did you hear something a few moments ago? I thought I heard a scream, but I was busy at the time and couldn't go investigate." The two would-be bank robbers Stun had been beating on when Stun heard Uriko's scream are now in two trashcans on the side of the road, where the police will pick them up later.  
  
" I heard something," Jenny says, nodding her head, " but my hearing's so good... I can pick up almost anything. I just try to drown out the sound of this city. If I didn't, I'd go mad."  
  
Stun nods, then says, " Yes, I see. Oh well. If it was a scream, nothing I can do about it now." Shaking his head at the somber facts of the matter, he says, " So. How are things between you and Gado? Is the old man still kicking around in the UN?"  
  
" Yes. He's been mad as hell at some of his fellow members, though. Some measure about human rights that he has been trying to get passed went into committee a few weeks ago, and when it came out it had an article tagged on that stated that "Zoanthropes shall not be considered for the protection of these rights." He's been in a state of uproar over it ever since. I was afraid he'd kill some of them, he was so incensed."  
  
Stun solemnly shakes his head. " Not that they wouldn't deserve it. The bastards. Why does mankind so fear that which is new?... Why does the Beast always slip out when the least shadow threatens?..."  
  
Jenny sighs. " I know. The world's in a sad state when you can compare it to Lord of the Flies."  
  
Stun looks up into the night sky, searching maybe, looking for those glimmering lights which have always given mankind something to dream on. " Whatever his faults, Golding knew more than enough about the Beast. More than enough. I think, sometimes, that maybe he knew the truth of everything... and that Lord of the Flies was just his attempt to put it all down."  
  
Jenny says to him, cocking her head to one side as she looks at him, " But surely you're not that pessimistic. Lord of the Flies is a good summing-up of fear's effects, but it's not all the truth."  
  
" Isn't it?" Stun says, returning his gaze to her. " Maybe all life boils down to is trying to find the Piggys in this world and doing your best to protect them from the Jacks. Trying to be a Ralph, as it were."  
  
Jenny inwardly wonders why such things, coming from Stun, do not seem as awkward as they would coming from someone else. Jenny is not the most poetic or eloquent of human beings (although her former job as a spy required some smooth talking, she has never been all that well-versed), and so she's never been able to say things like Stun has. It's one reason she's such good friends with him; he can say things that seem to her like statements of the deepest caliber. Gado, her lover, can do much the same thing, and she often wonders what a conversation between the two of them would sound like.  
  
[Probably like lines from a Shakespeare play,] she thinks, and smirks. She opens her mouth to say something, to begin debating the merits and values of Lord of the Flies, as she and Stun are so wont to do...  
  
A sudden piercing pain strikes her stomach. Her legs slip out from under her, and she lets out a high-pitched scream, one that is fortunately far too high for the humans below to hear. This is agony as she has never known before. Stun, ears ringing with Jenny's cry, grabs her before she hits the ground. She grits her teeth against the pain in her stomach, and her own fangs split her lower lip with two long, ragged gashes. She barely notices the warm taste of her own blood in her mouth. She is concentrating as hard as she can on simply controlling that pain, fighting it. She shakes violently in Stun's arms.  
  
Stun, not knowing what to do, says to her, his sibilant voice trembling with worry and fear, " Jenny! What's wrong?"  
  
Jenny, feeling her very soul being wronged as a Crest forms on her stomach, says to him, " Stun....," she draws in a sharp breath, and says all the rest in a single rush of breath, afraid that if she has to pause for breath, words will fail her and she will simply lie here moaning and shaking, " My stomach it hurts like getting clawed I'm being torn APART..!"  
  
This last she lets out in a scream, and as close as he is, it is deafening to him. Controlling his urge to clap his hands to the small holes that are his ears only with an effort, he gently lowers Jenny to the ground and folds her arms back. She is too weak to even help him, and she lays on the ground shaking. Stun hisses audibly, taken completely aback by what he sees before him. We, having leapt from our perches at the sound of her scream and have gathered around her, are taken aback as well, though not from surprise. We are shaken because we know what is ailing her.  
  
Jenny's stomach is shifting, twirling. It looks like the flesh is going to rip itself apart, and Stun is forcibly reminded of his own troubles, when a rib suddenly expanded or a shoulder bone forcibly jutted upwards and rent his skin apart from the inside. He wonders if maybe all Zoanthropes undergo these rapid mutations at some time, and if that is what ails Jenny. He has a few wraps with him (he always carries a few, just in case), but he doesn't know if he should bind up Jenny's stomach or not. If bone mutations are ailing her, then he has to bind her now, or it'll be too late when her ribs break out...  
  
Soon, the Mark solidifies on Jenny's stomach, forming the same set of three jagged slashes we saw on Shina earlier tonight. Jenny shivers on the ground, the pain leaving her a little, and she folds her wings over herself protectively. She tries to lift up, and the pain that shoots up from her stomach causes her to lose her control and fall back to the hard surface of the rooftop. Stun grabs her before then, and asks her, " Jenny? What the hell is going on?"  
  
She looks at him, chin covered in the blood that is starting to pour ever more rapidly from her torn lower lip, and she says, " Don't... know. Hurting... bad. My... lipsh..." Her voice is slurred, drowned in pain and blood.  
  
" Don't talk," Stun says, picking up his friend as gently as he can. " I'll take you to a small place I know around here. It's a private place- you can heal up there. But... your stomach..."  
  
Jenny looks at him, her lower lip already beginning to seal itself up as her Zoanthrope powers kick in, " What... was it? I... didn't.. see... Have I... been shot?" She can't think of anything else that could cause that kind of pain, though logically she knows she hasn't been shot. To her sensitive ears, even a silenced weapon sounds like a bulldozer running over panes of glass. Still...  
  
" No. You haven't been shot," Stun says, as he begins running towards an abandoned factory he found on one of his nightly tours of the city not too long ago, " I... don't know how to describe it. It looks like you've been slashed on the stomach, but the cuts appeared from the inside..."  
  
Jenny looks at him, her face an expression of the same confusion that now runs through Stun's mind. " What...?"  
  
" I don't know... Maybe it's a mutation or something along those lines. You can see when we get to the fact- to my safe place."  
  
And so Stun runs onward, as we follow behind him, towards his little hiding place in the factory. Which, in one of those quirks of Fate that crop up in every life, is the same place someone else that both Jenny and Stun are far too familiar with is currently heading to...  
  
-Read and review please! 


	4. Twilight's Gleam

Hey everyone. Silverlocke980 here. I've been kind of busy, so my stories have suffered... as a fan of my HP story wrote, " What happened to updating once a week?" Well... life happened. Ergo, I'm devoting my free time to writing. Hope this is up to the par of my usual work... which isn't that on par itself... (scratches back of head) uh... heh heh. Anway, thanks to all who read this story, and more thanks to those who reviewed it. The rest of you should too, by the way! (glares crazily at you) It's for my sanity, I swear!  
  
And as for Tiger... before my favorite Keniko loving friend picks up her baseball bat and starts using my head as target practice, I have this note. There will be a Keniko scene so touching, so loving, that you will break down into tears of happiness when you read it! (impressive sounding crack of thunder) So there! But that will come much later in the night. Sorry, but Kenji just tried to kill himself, and despite Bakuryu's valiant efforts to stop the mopey shit, he's still been badly hurt. It will take a while for him to wake up in Alice's hospital. Though that... is a story all it's own...  
  
Anyway, on with the night.  
  
"SHOWTIME."  
  
Night of the Mark  
  
Chapter Four  
  
Twilight's Gleam  
  
Abandoned Factory in Tokyo. 12:00 p.m., Midnight. Night of the Mark.  
  
Stun runs as fast as he can, the recovering (but still hurting- and oh God, what kind of pain is this she feels, what kind of pain could rend and tear with such viral force at her?) Jenny in his arms, heading towards a factory abandoned long ago. It was built, like many of Japan's post-WWII factories, by American soldiers, and several reminders lay inside (including, carved into the wall, an American flag in one corner that strikes Stun as reverent, solemn, somehow, a carving carrying it's own story of life and love and hope and all the matters those things portend) of the occupying army that generously rebuilt Japan after delivering a swift, solid kick to it's ass via atomic bomb. The factory was originally a steel mill, and the Tokyo City Council has constantly been passing motions to tear it down... and every time, they get voted down for some reason. Maybe a force beyond Time has protected this place, to make a safe haven for those who seek comfort in the night. Or maybe it's just dumb luck. As we fly past the running insect Zoanthrope, we head for this place and ponder the little enigma of it's existence. A small mystery, especially compared to all the bigger mysteries that float in the air tonight, but an intriguing one nonetheless. It's said that God delights in small miracles as well as large ones. Who knows? As our wills speed us far past the two Zoanthropes, we ponder these things.  
  
We reach the factory long before Stun and Jenny. It's midnight now, the witching hour, and on this night of all nights even the slightest noise or sound calls our attention. This factory is not the small, cheerful place we might have imagined in our heads, a little shack of a place with a small hole cut just right for a Zoanthrope in one boarded up window; this is a huge, rambling place, a maze of wires and belts, a labyrinth if there ever was one. It is a scary place, a place that does not seem to welcome visitors, and even though we are invulnerable to anything that might happen here, we still tremble in anticipation. This is not a place to tread lightly in. We land outside it and, steeling our nerves, walk forward. And immediately notice that the large front door is gone. Or, more correctly, crumpled into the doorway it used to guard. It looks as though something very large and very mad at the door has gone stampeding through it. Someone has beat Stun and Jenny to the factory. And it is most definitely not your average wanderer or city hobo. We rush in quickly, becoming like flowing water as we rush into the factory, over the ruined doorway. And stop as we see a most shocking sight.  
  
The first thing we notice is the creature's size. He is enormous. His back is broad, wide with rippling muscles under the surface of the skin. His pelt is gray, the fur dead seeming somehow, and the stripes are black. We see little of him, for his back is turned to us, but what we see is enough. This is Shenlong, Long's clone and one of the most twisted experiments Busuzima ever performed. Shenlong is among the world's first clones, but like all clones, he is mutated and wrong in some fundamental way. Cloning was not and never will be a thing mankind was meant to explore. The figure before us snorts, and lifts his nose to the air to sniff. The absurdly delicate twitching of the nose as it gently tests the air would almost be funny if the eyes below it were not so concentrated. Not so focused.  
  
Not so sad.  
  
And that is the main thing we get from this creature before us. Not a wave of evil (though that is there too, a far more diluted version of Busuzima's evil), not a sense of arrogance as we would expect from what we know about this man. It is sadness we feel most strongly, like teardrops heard in the rain. Sadness.  
  
And despair. Though many a poet throughout the long and winding road of human literature has used the two terms interchangeably, they are not one and the same. Sadness is a natural part of the human spirit. Without it, heartbreak would mean nothing, songs of love have no bittersweet taste, hope mean nothing without a counterpart. And that last is the real difference between the two. Sadness is the reason hope has meaning. Because we can suffer, we can try for better days. Despair is the lack of everything. Even hope. And that is the worst curse that can be wished on anyone. A wise man once said that if a man lacked everything but hope, he was in far better shape than a rich man who lacked nothing but hope. And he was right.  
  
Shenlong feels no hope. We check his mind, rifling through his memories as Busuzima rifled through the pockets of the drunks he killed (though with far nobler intentions), and find nothing but bleak despair. Here is a man who knows he is wrong, that something is fundamentally broken in him, but knows not how to fix it. He is worse off even than cold Shina, for though her life is cold, at least she has the comfort of knowing that, at the very least, she is natural to this world. Shenlong has no such comfort. No mother's womb caressed him. No childhood was ever his. And the only father he'd ever had was Busuzima, the laughing, stabbing monstrosity who tormented Shenlong's early days with experiments and needles. That is now one of Shenlong's phobias: he hates needles. Because every time he sees one, he remembers the first days of his life, when the first sight he saw when he awoke (during those few times Busuzima allowed him to wake up from his drug-induced stupor) was Busuzima holding the long, sharp needle that would send him back to sleep, and the last sensation he felt before succumbing to Busuzima's anathesia was the cold and darkness of his arm. He still has pockmarks from where Busuzima stabbed him time and time again, a set of angry puckered wounds in his arm. He knows that he could eliminate them by squeezing small capsules of Vitamin E onto his arm and rubbing it into the skin, but he leaves them be. What does it matter? His past is his past. No escape from it. No future to flee to. No dream to run towards.  
  
We discover all this in the few minutes it takes Stun to catch up with us and take a running leap off a nearby building. His aim perfect, he lands in an open window he cleared out himself when he first discovered this place. He lands with a muffled thump in what used to be an office, the floorboards creaking under his weight. Stun, busy both with the questions whirling about in his mind and the woman in his arms, has failed to notice anything out of the ordinary, to test the area as he would on any other night to make sure no one is watching him. Shenlong, who has no such distractions to bother him, is immediately aware of Stun. His head jerks up towards the noise two floors above him, his body tenses, and his mouth curls in an unconscious snarl at this new intruder. Presented with a choice, Shenlong decides in an instant what he wants to do. He found this place, by God. It is his right to enjoy a nice, comfortable stay here, and no one, not even some unknown Zoanthrope (Shenlong knows it's a Zoanthrope in the upper rooms through an act of intuitive logic: who else can leap from the roof of a nearby building and, over a distance of thirty feet, land in an open window on the third floor?) is going to take that right from him. He begins padding softly down the deserted, ramshackle hall where workers used to treat metal, on all fours now like the animal he so resembles. His padded claws make little noise on the metal floor, and the sounds of the old building creaking easily masks the soft thumps they make. He scans the walls as he goes, looking for possible ways to enter the upper floors quietly and discreetly. Not wanting to be left behind, we flap our wings and fly alongside him. The eerie quiet of the building strikes us as expectant, now. Something is about to happen.   
  
Soon enough, it does, in an episode that is so comic in it's ridiculous absurdity that we break out laughing at the sight of it. It strikes our slightly frightened, nervous minds as hilarious, as just the sort of thing that *would* happen in a moment like this, and works as a wonderful tension breaker. We howl in laughter as we look at what Shenlong has managed to do.  
  
Shenlong, in his crafty attempts to out-guile his new visitor, spotted a small chute leading to an upper floor. Thankfully, this chute is not made of metal (which would clang, creak, and bang loud enough to announce his presence to the whole of Tokyo) but of wood. It is a cheap replacement chute, designed to ferry loads of metal downward as fast as possible, made of wood because buying the actual metal chute would have strained company budget in that final downturn for the factory. When the factory failed, the workers left, and no one ever bothered to replace the wooden chute. So it has remained here, and protected as it is from most of the ravages of the elements, it is in reasonably good shape. It is also very close to the floor. Shenlong, grinning his catlike grin, decided to climb up this shaft. We floated in with him, room tight but manageable, and watched as he slowly and stealthily climbed up the chute. A small look of triumph glimmered in his eye...  
  
The entire chute fell down with a thunderous bang. Shenlong, letting out a surprisingly human " Shiiitttt!" as he fell, banged against the floor, dazed but okay. As he lay dazed in the remains of the shaft, the collapse of the chute caused other parts of the factory to go as well. Clang after clang reverberates in this place, as most of the second floor machinery crumbles to the ground. It is hard to imagine even a bombing run of American B-52s making more noise in this place. As we burst into laughter all around the stunned and comically confused looking Shenlong, we feel some tension ease out of us. Shenlong is dangerous, yes; but Stun and Jenny have now had the best possible warning of his presence we could have wished for. Even if we had been able to put our hand into events, we could scarcely have arranged for a better accident to befall the helpless clone. As he dazedly crawls out of the remains of the chute, we hear a noise above us, and glance up to see a very aware and slightly confused Stun peering over the hole in the roof that marked where the chute once was. As Shenlong crawls out and stands up, Stun hisses in displeasure.  
  
" You! What are you doing here?" Stun says, for good reason instantly suspicious of the trigger-happy clone's presence here. Stun thinks, in odd accordance with Shenlong before him, that this is his haven, and no one is going to take it from him. Especially not this man.  
  
Shenlong, still groggy and oddly embarassed with his own stupidity, looks up and growls. " I'd rather ask the same question of you, bug man." He bares his teeth at the insectoid face above him.  
  
" You'd receive no answer," Stun says to him, his height over Shenlong giving his words a hint of arrogance and distaste.  
  
Shenlong openly snarls this time, anger darkening his features. " Hey. I was here first. I heard you leap into the third floor window. I found this place. It's mine."  
  
" Actually, I found a few weeks ago," Stun says truthfully. " So, really, this place is mine. But I haven't the time to argue with you. Leave and disappear from my sight, o bleak creature."  
  
" And where the hell do you think I'll go?" Shenlong says, his rage building up at this arrogant, holier-than-thou creature above him. " And who the hell says things like "o bleak creature"? Where the hell did that come from?"  
  
" You shouldn't overuse the phrase," Stun says, this time actual distaste floating down to Shenlong. " If you do, saying "the hell" loses all it's potency. And as for "o bleak creature", that came from my own mind. Now, begone, I say."  
  
Shenlong lets out a growl, but unlike the others, it's obviously more than threat. " No."  
  
" Then suffer the consequences."  
  
With that, Stun does a very impressive divebomb right on top of the mutated clone. Twisting in the air as he goes, we watch Stun flip and land feet first on the ground where Shenlong was standing (he moved very quickly upon seeing a bug man trying to pummel him into the dirt). The shockwaves from his short flight send dust and rock spraying everywhere, and several sharp chunks fly through our spectral forms, making us very glad to be memories and not humans. We gather about this fight, watching with great interest to see who will be the victor here.  
  
Shenlong turns from his sideways leap and leaps again, a pounce this time, claws extended, long ribbons of silk flowing from bracelets on his arms. He snarls this time, mouth open to rend and tear this offending insect's head off. Stun has different ideas and falls flat on his back. As a student of the martial art commonly called "Wrestling", Stun is a master of weights and balances, of forces, as it were. He is also very good at making those forces work for him. As Shenlong leaps, Stun sticks his feet straight out, not kicking Shenlong in the chest but merely lifting him, pushing him up and over in the air. When the tiger is in the correct position, Stun bends his legs slightly and pushes out hard. Before Shenlong knows what is happening, Stun has ably kicked him into the nearest wall. The metal shrieks in protest and dents deeply as it accepts the weight of an enraged tiger Zoanthrope in full flight. He hangs in the air a moment, then drops with a muffled yelp of pain, back aching where it took the brunt of the impact. Shenlong looks up and snarls, seeing Stun just in time to roll out of the way of Stun's flying kick. Using both his legs to add force to the kick, Stun slams into the already weakened wall and further dents it, leaving two neat boot shaped imprints.   
  
Stun jumps off the wall and lands in a fighting position, body widespread and open to attack, ready to grab and counter any move of his opponent's. His legs are spread wide and his shoulder thrown forward, his hands held out to the sides with palms up. It is a classic wrestler's pose. Shenlong runs forward, roaring. He swings his left claw in a blistering strike. Stun ducks under it and tackles his opponent, throwing him to the ground. Stun gets up far faster than his opponent does and grabs the tiger's left leg. Before Shenlong can move to kick him off, Stun performs a superhuman effort and slams him into the ground facefirst. As the tiger roars his pain, Stun grabs the leg he holds with both hands and falls on top of Shenlong, back first. The resultant pressure shatters the tiger's kneecap, and though the pain is nearly blinding, so is Shenlong's will. Putting his claws under him, Shenlong shoves to the right, throwing Stun off of him. Stun has the good sense to let go of the now-useless leg he holds (though it won't be useless long; in human form, the healing powers of Zoanthropes are extremely weak, but in beast mode they are nigh unstoppable) and scrambles out of the way before being squished underneath Shenlong. Shenlong slashes at Stun viciously, and his left claw finds purchase in Stun's arm. As Stun utters a grunt of pain and tries to remove the claws piercing his bicep, Shenlong pulls him closer, dragging him with his left hand and striking with his right. The claw should have rent his face apart, but Stun's mutated body is proving it's worth once again; the hard plates that make up his face are only badly scratched and nothing vital is pierced. Lashing out with his left hand to prevent a repeat performance, Stun begins bashing Shenlong's tiger snout, breaking the sensitive nose and cracking some of the long fangs. Shenlong roars, and Stun's fist goes straight into his mouth by pure accident. Shutting his mouth reflexively to avoid choking on Stun's fist, his fangs sink through Stun's plate armor and cause a rush of blood to pour out into his open mouth. Just as stuck as Stun is, Shenlong can do nothing but feel that blood pouring down his throat, and unable to swallow it, the blood begins choking him. Opening his mouth to free it, he coughs and splutters, muzzle crimson with the blood of both here. He removes his claw from Stun as well, in his panic wanting forgetting about Stun and concentrating just on getting a breath. The tiger rolls over, ignoring the pain in his legs, and coughs loudly and deeply. Blood and vomit pour out his mouth as he desperately tries to rid his system of this alien intruder.  
  
Stun, freed now, rolls away and gets back to his feet. Holding his left arm in his right hand, gazing at the puncture holes with a clinical eye, he focuses his willpower and morphs into his insect form. Now far larger than his opponent, Stun stands and feels his body healing. As the tiger Zoanthrope's ferocious coughing settles down, Stun watches him and focuses on getting his breathing under control.  
  
" You could end this, you know," Stun says as the tiger's breathing returns to normal.  
  
Still coughing up blood, Shenlong says nothing.  
  
" If you really don't have another place to go..." Stun mentally bites his lip and considers. Then he sighs, the act very strange looking in his new form. " This place is useless to me now. It's value lies in the fact that no one else knows about it. Now that value is gone."  
  
Shenlong doesn't finish that sentence, but reads the implied ending: If he is dead, then it's value returns to it.  
  
" So," Stun says, sighing once more, " I have no choice but to give it up to you. This battle will go on until one of us is dead, and I have had my share of fighting for tonight. I don't want to take the life of another Zoanthrope. Not now, not ever. I'd hoped to scare you off, make you leave... but since that will not work, I concede the battlefield to you."  
  
Shenlong, his breathing coming in great gasps of air, replies to him, sarcasm like an auditory blade coming out in his words, " Right. And I believe that. You just fought me, got bit by me, broke my leg, and tried to choke me to death... and now you're just gonna give the place to me. Right. And I'm George Bush."  
  
" Believe what you will," Stun says, noting even as he says it how absurd things look from Shenlong's point of view. " But I am being truthful. I am leaving now. Stay here if you wish. There are a few medical supplies in an office on the third floor. Stay here for a while, until your leg heals. Then head up there." Stun nods towards the other end of the hall. " Down there, there is a ladder that I sometimes use. It leads up to the third floor." Preparing to leave, Stun spreads his strangely feeble looking wings and begins to beat them, slowly at first, then more rapidly as his muscles warm to the task. " Do not seek to follow me, and I will not return to bother you. The police patrol this area at times; if you see flashing lights, try to stay hidden."  
  
" Why are you doing this?" Shenlong asks, utterly confused. " I... just tried to kill you..."  
  
" Yes," Stun says, as his wings speed up enough to allow him to hover over the ground slightly, legs dangling, " you did. But I've always felt sorry for you. We all live such damned lives... you more than the rest of us. You have been given a label, and nothing is harder to get rid of once received. It's the label of monster."  
  
As he begins to fly straight up into the hole in the ceiling, Stun tosses down these last words, words that confuse the tiger Zoanthrope even more.  
  
" And maybe... you don't deserve it."  
  
Stun flies out, and we follow him, but slowly. We are torn now, unable to stay any longer (for we must visit another soon), but wanting to see Shenlong's reaction to such strange kindness. His reaction is simple. It is a complete loss of everything- words, thoughts, actions. He merely stares up into the space where Stun flew upwards, stares after the man who has just said the one thing he has wanted to hear his entire life. Who has told him that maybe he isn't a freak, a monster. That maybe he is not entirely wrong, in every way.  
  
We reluctantly leave now, sure that Shenlong's next thoughts (when they recover) will be interesting, to say the least, but completely unable to stay. Our mission compels us ever onward, and we must go now to Long, the man Shenlong was cloned from. We leave Shenlong and fly into the night through cracks in the wall, and soon he is beyond our ability to sense. We let out a collective sigh. Oh well. Maybe his next few thoughts were not meant for us to peruse. We fly onward, into the night.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Long's house, several blocks away. 12:35 p.m.  
  
What we just saw was very active, very destructive, no? Very energetic. So let us go now to the complete antithesis of the factory we were just in. That was a huge place, sprawling, eerie, empty, everything inside dead save for the combatants fighting inside (and, of course, the wounded Jenny, still recovering from the Mark on her chest in Stun's little room, hearing the battle below her but unable to move or help Stun in any way). It was, in essence, the perfect place to have a great big battle: no civilans, plenty of interesting objects to get slammed into, and a great atmosphere to keep you entertained while you dodge punches. Quite a nice place, really.  
  
This place is it's polar opposite. It is small, cramped, with few solid objects that would make combat more interesting, while also being less eerie and more cheerful. It is a small, prefabricated home, one of those so common in Japan, and the rent on the place is very cheap. Long is a librarian, and so cannot afford more than this little place. It's all he needs, though. Even the most pitiful of homes is a big step above a cave with grass bedding. We fly down and slip in through minute cracks in the walls so as to see the object of our attentions clearer.  
  
Inside, the house continues it's trick of being small, quiet, and invisible. The first part is a long, twisting hallway, lined with shelf after shelf of books, most of them belonging to the library where Long works. They cover a huge variety of topics. The first covers we read (our eyes barely making them out in the dim light; bright light hurts Long's sensitive eyes) as we pass through this little entry hall deal with art, the next few with poetry, another with dancing, and at the end, a few classics ("Lord of the Flies", in another of those little quirks of Fate that are starting to crop up everywhere now that we have gained partial omniscience, lays on these shelves) sit to round out this small gathering of the arts. Past that, the details of the many wars mankind has waged with itself are collected, and even further past that, the art of combat is detailed, in the many ways it can be performed. The most well-thumbed book in this section (in fact, in the whole library) is the famous swordsman Musashi's "Book of Five Rings", detailing how the ancient samurai saw life. Though he never bathed and believed women were a waste of time, he was amazingly insightful into many other things, even going so far as to approach all life in five basic ways. Fire, Wind, Water, Earth, and Void. It is this last that Long ponders most often, especially when dealing with his youngest student, Uriko. He sees great potential in her, but sometimes that potential manifests itself in startling ways. The Void represents pure creation, the making of something out of nothing, the continual birth of the new. And that is a perfect fit for Uriko. She is fast, sometimes blindingly so, but at times this shifts and she becomes slower, more methodical, weaving in and out of attacks and striking with calm precision. At other times, her normally weak arms become sledgehammers, and she strikes with a rain of blows, ignoring subtlety and speed in favor of rapid fire strikes. And then again, she sometimes changes tactics and becomes counter based, not striking at all, barely moving save to turn some of his own attacks against him. She is strange, this young one. Her form is a half-beast, and he wonders sometimes if that is not the result of failed experimentation, but a reflection of her soul. She is young yet, and unformed, full of pure potential. And so her form is caught between human and animal, not really changing into any definite form like a lion or leopard, but just the generic form of "feline". He wonders if that will change as she ages. It is an interesting question, for this man who spends most of his time pondering such things. Yugo once joked, at a dinner Gado had hosted, that Long would eventually solve the riddle of life, all while sitting in his easy chair. Long, in his quiet way, had replied to great amusement all around that he'd already solved it and had moved on to the next question. Long is not a jester like Yugo, making a lovable fool out of himself, but he is a master of the deadpan delivery.  
  
As we walk down this impromptu library, the walls of shelves turn right suddenly, forming a sharp corner. As we turn it, we walk down a small set of steps that Long built himself, and enter the living room. The first thing one notices is the fireplace. It is another of the many things here Long has built himself, and it is majestic in this small home. It is also completely out of place, but looks so nice that only the most die-hard interior decorators would ever raise a complaint about it. It is brick and burning quite cheerfully at the moment, lighting up the dim room with a pleasant amber glow. The gentle light of a fire is one of the few lights that Long can deal with; his eyes are very sensitive, and he's been blinded more than once by approaching cars who forget to turn off their lights. One of the abbreviated reasons he prefers to walk instead of drive. Long's eyes are not completely without power, however; as if to make up for their weakness in the day, they possess perfect night vision. In this dim glow, where even we have some trouble picking out details, Long can see minute cracks on the surface of the walls. Enhancing our sight as best as we can, we pick out other details of the room.  
  
Continuing the library motif, the walls are packed with shelves of books, but these are different; these are memoirs and combat tutorials written by Long himself. He has published none of these publicly, and binds them himself, so no one knows they exist. Long sometimes loans the combat books to Uriko, to help her learn the Kenpo techniques he teaches, but as a general rule, the books stay here. He enjoys reading them in the dim and quiet of his home, reviewing and making corrections as necessary. Much like his feline counterpart, Long is a quiet man, and a loner. Though he enjoys the company of others, he does not require it to be happy. A true rarity, in a world where couples are the norm and the single are regarded as freaks.  
  
Though, if Long had better skills with women, he would not be single for long. He likes Shina, and is even starting to believe he loves her... which is why he is so worried now. He heard a scream, some time ago, and it has contributed to a sense of general unease that permeates his thoughts. He is worried, this man. Worried about his love (though she is not his lover; Long is a virgin, having lived his life as, in order, an assassin, a hermit, and now a librarian, and hence is without knowledge in this aspect of life) and throughout this night he has been wrestling with his feelings, trying to pin them down. The ferocious itching on the upper right part of his leg has not helped at all; scratch as he might, he cannot make it quit itching. Soon enough, it will turn into a Crest.  
  
Continuing our scan of the room, we notice him pacing it's small carpet floor, adjusting and readjusting his glasses as he tries furiously to ignore his leg. An enormous easy chair, the Japanese equivalent of a La-Z-Boy, lays in the center of the room, oriented so that the firelight will fall on whatever book Long is reading. If Long has a vice, it's that he loves comfort. Having lived in a cave for a good portion of his life, Long has an almost obsessive need to make his surroundings comfortable, to make his home luxurious in *his* sense of the word, to have a place he feels safe in. Just as his tiger counterpart will reject resting place after resting place because it feels uncomfortable there, so will Long constantly seek to make his home feel secure to him. The fact that as a Zoanthrope he is more secure in the middle of a battlefield than most normal humans are in a police station does little to ease his need. As we glance around, we notice that his needs have been ably met; this place oozes comfort, and after the very long and tiring night we've had so far, that couch looks most comfortable. But it is not our lot to sleep. We must trudge on, until the break of day and the strange new world it will herald.  
  
And even then, the story might continue on.  
  
Distracted by our survey of the room, we have not noticed Long stop his pacing. When we return our attention to him, we see that his brow is furrowed, as if he is coming to a decision. His looks grow steadily more and more concentrated until finally, with a violent shake of the head, he gathers his courage and grabs his keys. Running out into the night, he heads for the Mansion de Leo. He is going to check on Shina, and though it is a considerable run, this is a considerable man.  
  
Silent as ghosts, we follow.  
  
- Read and review, please. And to Tiger... put the bat down, please! :) 


	5. The Burning Soul

Hey people. Wow... two updates in almost as many days. Silverlocke's freaking here, people! Muhahahaha! (glances around crazily) Actually, it's mostly because I want to get this story done. I'm a little over halfway through the night, and I want to hurry up and finish it. I've got too many stories going on as it is... and it's frying my brain. O_O  
  
Haven't had a chance to see reviews yet, so here's a preemptive "THANK YOU!" to all my reviewers. And Tiger5913, who will most definitely be reviewing, if only to yell at me for not having any Keniko scenes :P.  
  
So hold on to your asses, ladies and gentleman, because it's now...  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter Five  
  
The Burning Soul  
  
Night sky over Tokyo. Near Mishiyama building. 12:48 a.m., Night of the Mark.  
  
We left Long some time ago, heading north when he turns east to reach Gado's mansion. We will return to him later tonight, soon after he reaches the Mansion de Leo, but that is a part of our tale we have yet to reach. At the moment, we must catch up with a former acquaintance. As we flit through the suburbs of Tokyo, racing faster than the wind through the streets at ground level, we notice the houses gradually become fewer and fewer, then stop as great buildings of steel and glass take over. Factories, headquarters, skyscrapers... these are the rule in this part of Tokyo. Most of them are dark and silent- it is getting rather late, after all- but a few have lights on inside, where workaholics desperately work on that one last project for the boss. Ah, the joys of business.  
  
But we have no time for these side stories, entertaining though they might be. Rather, our target lies ahead. It is a being we are familiar with, having watched it be born into this world, but not a being we want to meet. Though we know we are invulnerable to all that might happen here, still we tremble with fear. This being is so far beyond anything we've encountered so far that even the greatest of shields seems puny compared to it's might. But we must ignore our fear and plunge with courage into darkness. We fly on.  
  
Soon, passing several large skyscrapers belonging to automotive companies, a chemical developer, and several other assorted businesses, we come to our ultimate goal. The largest skyscraper here, towering far above the others. We gaze up at it's massive steel and glass bulk, and gathering our resolve fly straight up it. In our fear, we fly far faster than normal, and the glass windows seem to blur before us as we rush up the side of the skyscraper. There are no lights inside. No one wants to stay in this building after dark, not even the janitors. None of the employees inside could tell you exactly what they feel, but there is something wrong with this place. A young woman once walked in with a cross necklace on, and as she passed the doorway it suddenly grew so hot that she had to run back out into the streets. After that, she refused to go back into the building, and moved to another city. She never told anyone about it, but later in her diary she recorded that she'd felt something tug at her, some spinning whirling garbling *thing* that seemed to reach right in to her mind... and then she'd felt some other force pushing it back. She did not know then and does not know now what had happened there, but she now refuses to buy any products of the Mishiyama Corporation.  
  
And that is hard to do. For this company makes everything from baby powder to cereal boxes. It is almost impossible to avoid buying something of theirs, even if it's in an indirect way, like buying a telephone whose box was made by the Mishiyama Corporation. Thankfully, Mishiyama Corporation is limited to Japan only, but their influence is incredible. They are a force to be reckoned with.  
  
As we fly up, up, to the very top of this building, we sense some of that evil. We are protected... but the thing inside is very foul. This building reeks of some nameless filth, some evil so ancient that mankind has failed to name it. It is an evil that came to this place when Mr. Mishiyama, the CEO of this corporation, bargained away his very soul so that he could become a rich man. He was poor then, living off the streets, but as soon as the bargain was struck, he bought a lottery ticket worth four million dollars. The money more than tripled on the stock market and since then has just kept going up. With it he started this company, and now Mr. Mishiyama is rich beyond his wildest dreams.  
  
Pathetic that he would sell his soul for such a meager thing.  
  
As we pass the last few floors, the feeling of wrongness intensifies, because in these top floors where only Mr. Mishiyama goes, there is a design on the floor. A design made to call things into being. To give unnatural terrors a way into this world...  
  
We begin to hear chanting. It is in no language we know, and that is startling, for we have the power to understand any language, no matter how old or dead it may be, and this is no tongue we can understand. As we ascend to the top of this pit, we see the monster itself. And we tremble.  
  
The winds blow fierce up here, fierce enough that were we in mortal guise, we would be picked up and tossed around like rag dolls. The clouds above this place are stormy, but not with natural lightning- this lightning is red and fierce. The clouds themselves seem swollen, somehow, as if bulging far beyond their normal limits. Across from us, black flames that give no light circle and gambole about in hellish ecstasy on the rooftop where Xion dances, performing the ritualistic chants and maneuvers that will call into being the Tabula. It is already partially formed, a massive stone disk floating in the air, chunks of it missing and coming into being out of nothingness as Xion completes the spell. A half-blurred face floats across it's brown surface, floating in and out of nothingness and giving us a bare glimpse of some strange visage that is all teeth and eyes. The few glances we get of it give us the impression of something searching. What does this hellspawn seek...?  
  
Without warning, the clouds burst. A rain comes pouring down, so fierce and strong that every drop hits like a sledgehammer. We know. Because we feel it. The shock of being touched in this realm causes us to cry out.  
  
The face looks at us.  
  
Xion stops in it's dancing, staring at us with those ghastly mutated eyes. It sees a group of people, wings spread out, some looking like gargoyles while others resemble angels, all crying out as the rain pours down in a liquid sheet. The drops strike us and make us visible to all. Lightning cracks. Thunder roars.  
  
The face opens it's mouth.  
  
A force so strong that it shoves the water droplets aside in a gushing flurry ripples out of the mouth and dashes across the rooftop at us. We scramble to the sides, dodging it just as it strikes the concrete edge of this building. It shatters the barrier and sends chunks of rock raining down below. From this height, the chunks will have the impact of meteors. We've no time to notice or care about their impact below, however. We came here thinking we were invincible- so much for THAT idea- and are now in for the fight of our lives. Or, more correctly, the flight. We are not allowed to directly interfere here, and though if we fought we might prove stronger than the entity of the Tabula, we must leave that battle to others. We leap off the rooftop, out of the pouring rain that covers this spot and only this spot, and as the raindrops leave our skin we immediately become invisible again. The creature on the rooftop shouts something in it's foul, guttural language, and Xion cries out as well, but we are now beyond them, beyond their senses to detect and harm. We fly out a ways, past that revealing rain, and circle the building once, glaring at the monsters atop it. We will be back, soon. With friends.  
  
Let us fly away from this place.  
  
************************************************************************  
  
Roads of Tokyo, heading towards Mansion de Leo. 1:00 a.m.  
  
We fly fast, now, and pick up Long's trail on the sidewalks of Tokyo. He is running, this man, running very fast, because he senses that whatever is going to happen to his love is going to happen soon. The being that is now descending on Gado's house like some nightmare crow could attest to that. After all, she's the one who will be doing the harming here.  
  
Long runs as fast as he can, his hair flying out behind him, his glasses barely staying atop his nose. Still shaken by our encounter with the Tabula, we keep pace with him as we ponder the events of the night. We were sent to watch and record and generally stay out of things, but we've ended up being seen and maybe interfering without meaning to. Who knows what Xion and the Tabula are doing now, having been visited by such strange and spectral guests as ourselves? Just the knowledge that beings like ourselves exist might profoundly change the course of this world. We may have just signed the death warrants of all the Zoanthropes here. Shaking our heads, we breathe a collective sigh and relegate what has happened to the back of our minds. We can do nothing about the past. If it all really begins to end, we will head back to that tower and try to fight in the rain. The rain made us vulnerable- but it also made us physical. We do have a chance to fight back, if all else fails, but to do so would be a violation of the most profound order. We must stay back and hope that we have done nothing to harm the heroes of this world.  
  
As we follow this particular hero, we glance up into the sky and gasp. The moon is gone. Where it once was, the blackness of an enormous rain cloud reigns. In our troubles and worries, we had not noticed it getting darker. We tremble in our hearts and wonder exactly what is going on here. If the rain that the sky-covering monstrosity above us promises is the same rain that covered the rooftop of the Mishiyama Corporation, we are going to be in serious trouble. Soon, thunder cracks, and a lightning bolt splits the sky. Rain begins to pour in ever thickening sheets, and for one heart-pounding second, we wait for it to touch us... and to our relief, it passes through our skin and falls to the ground. Whew. We can continue our mission here.  
  
Still running, our Chinese friend has taken off his glasses and placed them in a pocket in his shirt. He has no time to be distracted by water striking his lenses. That feeling of urgency, of black expectation, is growing stronger by the minute. All of his senses are on high alert. As he runs down the sidewalk, passing bystanders without a single glance at them, the rain begins to come down in almost literal sheets, in eerie mimicry of the rain above the Mishiyama Corporation. Xion is doing more than mess with the heads of the Zoanthropes here; he's screwing with the weather. Cursing the bastard, we continue flying beside Long as he makes a final turn and reaches the Mansion de Leo.  
  
Continuing his run, unaware of the floating being about whom storm clouds gather like the robes of a queen, Long reaches the front gate. Clearing it in a single leap, he bounds over the wall and runs up to the front door. He pounds on it three times, in his haste forgetting his dignity as a gentleman. Pausing for breath after his long run, he waits with one hand pressed against the door for someone to open it. His keen ears pick up heavy footsteps coming down the stairs, and he breathes a sigh of relief that things must still be alright, if Gado is coming in such a calm, easy manner to answer the door. Gado opens the door with a slightly bewildered look.  
  
" Yes who is it... Long? What the hell are you doing here?" Gado's mercenary eye quickly taking in the details of Gado's clothing, he exclaims, " You ran here in the rain, didn't you? What is going on here?"  
  
Long, waving his questions aside with his hand so he can catch his breath, says, " Hold... on. Let me... in."  
  
Gado steps aside, and Long walks into the house, dripping water all over the marble floor. Pausing for a moment, Long says, " Is Shina... here?"  
  
An annoyed look crosses Gado's face. " I know you have something for my daughter, but trust me, her companionship isn't *that* worthwhile. Yes, she's here. Why?"  
  
Long shakes his head, desperately drawing in breath. " Nothing... to do... with that, sir. It's just..." Long pauses, unable to decipher his thoughts and feelings and put them into words. He finishes rather weakly, " Something's going to happen..."  
  
" What?" Gado says, just as the ceiling explodes. Chunks of plaster rain down, and still fresh from our encounter with the Tabula, we instinctively dodge out of the way. Remembering that at the moment we are invincible, we quickly gather our wits and look upwards, to see the cause of this intrusion. She floats there, white hair plastered to her skull from the rain, her eyes dead but alive with some strange tormenting delight. She is small and slender, but the lightning crackling all around her is very much alive. This is Uranus, another of Busuzima's experiments (that man's evel reaches far beyond himself, in black ripples that upset the entire watery surface of the universe). Her origins are a mystery, even to her. Not that she cares. She cares for nothing of this world, for she lacks even the small sliver of humanity that Shenlong holds onto.  
  
The one thing she cares about is death.  
  
Her eyes gleam. Her lips move, in a wordless whisper.  
  
Lightning rains down into the now open-roofed marble parlor, striking and destroying everything they touch. Beams of power stroke the ground, creating jagged trails of destruction as they travel like the searching fingers of some malevolent giant. Plaster rains everywhere, as well as pieces of marble-coated steel and chunks of floor. The air is clouded with dust.  
  
Uranus smiles. The smile stays on even as the chunk of plaster Gado has thrown strikes her face and knocks her flight off balance. Already in beast mode, Gado roars his rage. Long, transforming as well, snarls up at the flying monster as well. They have met Uranus before, and know her tricks. Though both sense that she is far more powerful now than she has been in their last encounters... Ignoring this, Gado leaps out of the rubble filled parlor and slashes at Uranus. She nimbly dances away in the air, and as he passes her she strikes him with a vicious downwards kick. The force sends him flying downwards, and he strikes the stairs with a muffled oomph. Uranus smiles at him, summoning her lightning, but she is interrupted by a third roar. We, while watching the battle before us, had not noticed Shina running in from her bedroom on the second floor. She has transformed to beast mode, and now her leopard form screams at Uranus from the upper balcony. Uranus, as happy to kill her as she is to kill her father, redirects her lightning at Shina, smiling all the while. Shina dodges to the left, rolling behind a pillar for cover. Purple fire blasts the ground beside her.  
  
Long grabs a chunk of marbled steel and hurls it with deadly aim at Uranus. It strikes her back, and the grinning madwoman falters in the air for a second. It's enough time for Shina to leap and bite her shoulder, dragging her down with her. As Uranus struggles with the feline Zoanthrope determined to bite her throat out, Gado leaps up as well, grabbing Uranus' leg and giving it a fierce downward tug. Gado's strength proves too much for her, and Uranus tumbles to the ground. Shina lets go and falls to the side, but Gado isn't so nimble, and ends up underneath Uranus. When they strike the ground, Uranus is standing on top of his chest. She smiles at him and begins kicking his face in. Gado grabs her with his right claw and flings her small form away from him, tearing part of her shirt in the process. Uranus hits the wall and little chunks of plaster puff out to either side of her. She falls down and sits in a fallen position for a little while, grin still pasted to her face, atop the grand staircase that was the hallmark of this room. She rises slowly, smiling at the three Zoanthropes like some demented jester, and raises her arms. Lips moving again in that same soundless whisper, she fills the room with her energy. Lightning crackles and violet fire burns, as Uranus smiles. The power flowing from her is incredible; even we feel it, and as we look in worry about the room, we notice the three claw marks on Uranus' shoulder. We would never have seen them if Gado had not ripped her shirt there; as it is, we see it, and Uranus' newfound power suddenly makes sense. She's been to see Xion. And that bodes ill for all here. Uranus' power, a sizzling white hot force prepared to burn everything in the room to nothingness, lashes out. Gado and Long fall to their knees, bodies burning and lungs frying as electricity courses through them. We curse and almost wish the Tabula's nightmare rain would come. In it, at least, we could fight and aid them. Here, in this marble home, we can do nothing.  
  
But we do not have to. Another force, this force a raging, burning flame, suddenly makes itself apparent. Shina, eyes closed, her leopard form tense and snarling, is still standing, and heat is rippling out from her. Uranus' smile falters for the first time, and she concentrates her power on Shina. A bolt of lightning crackles out of Uranus. It is rebuffed by a wall of heat so strong that it is melting part of the floor around Shina. Shina opens her eyes and snarls. Uranus cocks her head, wondering why her power isn't working.  
  
Shina's Crest glows.  
  
Shina crosses the room in a blur, leaping at Uranus. Her claws make flaming trails in the air as they swipe once, twice, three times. Shina flails her opponent, spinning and lashing and lunging, and Uranus is covered in cuts by the time Shina quits striking her and leaps into the air. But Shina is not finished yet. Shina makes an X in the air with her body, legs and arms flung outwards, and her power concentrates into one vital blow. An X of flame covers Uranus, burning her in it's flames, destroying her hold on the room. Uranus staggers backwards, still on fire, her hair curling and singeing. She flees into the night. Gado and Long, hurt and dazed but still alive, follow her with their eyes.  
  
Above them, reverted to human form, Shina drops from the sky.  
  
- Read and review please! And if anyone knows exactly *what* Uranus is, please tell me in your review. See you all later! 


	6. Roads of the Wounded

Hey everybody. Yeah, I know.... " Oh my God, Silver's UPDATING?" Well, yeah. It's been a little late in coming, but it's finally here now. Chapter Six of Night of the Mark! And madness reigns.  
  
Thanks to everyone who told me about Uranus. The information has been most... helpful... (wicked grin, little voice in back shouting: Story Ideas!)  
  
And to Tiger.... just one note....  
  
Stop chasing the BR men! I need them for my story! :)  
  
Enough of that.... 'cause now it's a very belated....  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter Six  
  
Roads of the Wounded  
  
Mansion de Leo, Tokyo, Japan. 1:40 a.m. Night of the Mark.  
  
Shina falls, her energy wasted and spent in one great blaze, her body human and her mind exhausted. As she falls, Long tries to leap to her- but he cannot. His body has been too badly harmed by Uranus' electricity to work, and he merely falls down, struggling and snarling helplessy at the floor as his muscles refuse to work. He scrambles desperately, madly, trying to make his body leap up and save the woman he loves before she plummets to her death (and her death it will surely be; she is up at an incredible height, and in human form the marble floor of her own home will be more than enough to kill her). If Long cannot save her, she is doomed.  
  
But as we watch in mingled horror at her peril and amazement at her power, Gado leaps, performing a father's duty by saving his little girl. Physically (and, perhaps, mentally) Gado may be the strongest of all the Zoanthropes. Though Uranus' electricity has greatly wounded him, his will to save his daughter overrides such trivial matters. He will spend the rest of the night in a hospital bed (right beside his daughter, Long, and Kenji Ohgami) but at the moment, his great will supports him, and he moves through the air with all the grace his enormous form can muster. He catches Shina almost gently (though the impact makes him cringe; she connected solidly with his big, open paws) and turns before he lands, so that he ends up facing the still fallen Long. As he puts his daughter down (and even now, she is starting to wake up, to recover from the effects of her rage- it is hard to keep a Zoanthrope down) he feels his paternal instinct leave him, and he collapses to the floor. As he lays there, panting and feeling his body trying to recuperate itself (but this is a great deal of damage, damage he might not be able to fix without help) he looks at the fallen Long, still struggling to get up, not realizing that Shina is already safe. Gado feels a moment of great liking for Long, who tried to save Shina despite the great wounds inflicted on him, and Gado's respect for Long goes up. Then most conscious thought leaves him as he collapses on his backside, leaning against a wall, his body slowly fixing itself.  
  
Shina twitches on the ground, just barely coming awake, and as her eyes shudder open Gado lets out a sigh. Coming from his bestial form, it sounds like a snarl, and Shina's eyes fly open in a snap. She turns her head (slowly; she is drained badly) and looks her father in the eye.  
  
" Father?" she says (she has not and never will call him "Dad"; she thinks the title is childish and insulting to both parties). " What... happened...?"  
  
" You.... fought.... her...." Gado pants, his words slurred as they exit the fanged snout that is now his mouth. " You.... drove her off...." he breathes deeply, what little stamina he has left taken up in the effort of talking. We move closer, shaking our wings uneasily, staring upwards into the gaping darkness through which Uranus both came and went into this mansion. We glance up uneasily, for we fear she might return, and none of the three warriors here possess the strength to fight her should she attack again. But all we see in the night are the flickers of lightning and the pouring rain.  
  
" Good..." Shina rests for a moment, eyes closed, then a thought occurs to her and she snaps them open. " Long... is he alright? I.. couldn't..."  
  
" He's fine," Gado interrupts his daughter, his head clearing slightly and his breathing returning to normal as his body fixes the worst of the damage Uranus has caused. It will be some time before he is fully recovered, but for now he can move. And move he should. " We have to get out of here," he says, clambering painfully up. " She.... might come back."  
  
Shina nods from the floor. " Agreed. Where... should we go?"  
  
Gado steadies himself for a moment against the wall behind him, then looks at her again. " The hospital. Alice's.... should be okay there. Got to... warn them... Busuzima might be back..."  
  
Shina grunts her assent and picks herself up off the ground. She is tired, but of the three the least wounded. Her own power protected her against Uranus', and so her wounds are light- mostly scrapes and bruises that are already healing. But the greatest wound is not in her body, but in her soul. With our sight, we can see something behind her, a mocking laughing face of eyes and teeth, grinning... it's just a phantom, like something half seen on a winter night, but it's still there, and it's grinning it's ugly head off. Because Shina just used it's power. Just tapped into it.  
  
And that means she's started to become part of it.  
  
We know many things. Sometimes, that is more curse than blessing. Because we know what the Crests do. Shina's lifeline has just been shortened immeasurably. The Crests grant great power, but it comes with a heavy price. Because these things were forced upon the Zoanthropes, their power does not come at the cost of one's soul (for one's soul can only be thrown away or taken back knowingly, can only be lost or saved with one's full knowledge of the consequences) but that does not mean that they come without a price. Everyone has a vital lifeforce, an outflowing of chi (as the Japanese would call it; it is not the true name of this force, but the best name mortals have given it) that gives them their unique personalities, their potential in life.  
  
Every time the Crests are used, they permanently drain this chi. This life. And they consume it whole.  
  
As we watch the greatly weakened Shina and Gado pull themselves together, Long lets out one last great exclamation (in Mandarin Chinese; roughly translated as " Damn it!") and then passes out. He stays in beast form (turning from one form to another is a conscious thing for most Zoanthropes, Uriko being an exception) and so his body continues to heal itself, though at a greatly reduced rate. All activities of the body lose something when we sleep, and in Long's semi-coma, his body's activities are losing much indeed. Shina and Gado walk laboriously towards the Tiger Zoanthrope, and Shina slowly slaps him awake. Gado reverts out of beast form (belaboring the loss of healing, but he must be human to grab his car keys and take them all to the hospital) and heads towards his room. As Long slowly wakes up to Shina's cold, military face, we flap our wings and take flight. We are heading to the hospital too, for there will be nothing of interest happening elsewhere in Tokyo for some time tonight. But the hospital (and one room in particular, one Kenji Ohgami is currently resting in) holds much promise for excitement. For memories.  
  
For the dreams that support reality.  
We take wing and fly.

  
  
Room 350, Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near both Oghami and Nonomura households. 2:00 a.m. Night of the Mark.  
  
As we fly into the night, nervously looking about for Uranus, Xion, or that thrice-damned Tabula, we notice that most of the city is lit up tonight. Very few people are sleeping, even at this late hour when all but the most dedicated insomniacs are asleep, and that should strike us as strange. It feels perfectly normal, however; the wild night we've had, and the events occuring now, are so important, so powerful, that even ordinary humans are feeling it's effects. Though we should not call them ordinary; for all humans, even the lowliest, have power in them. It is not power in numbers, for humans in numbers are weak things, stupid things, possessed of a mob mentality that shrieks for death and destruction and illogic; but power by themselves. Each individual human holds the potential to raise themselves to the highest level of good and honor; each holds the potential to become monsters beyond even the demons we have seen tonight. They are far from ordinary, in a universe almost soley composed of soulless, automaton creatures that act on mere instinct and base drives.  
  
As we fly onward, flapping our wings and trying to see past this rain that threatens to blind us permanently, we see the great looming shape of the hospital rising before us. It is an enormous place, serving as it does most of Tokyo. It is in a prime location, near the middle of the city, and so has thousands of beds. The one we are interested in now is Room 350, a room where Kenji Ohgami is just starting to wake up from his suicide attempt two hours ago. Where three very nervous loved ones wait and go through their various nervous habits.  
  
We flap in through a closed window (intangibility would be an enormous boon to burglars if they could ever figure out how to do it) and enter the building, our presence not even enough to flap the curtain now closed over it. We settle into our various places in the hospital room, spreading out for comfort. This is a spacious room, designed for multiple patients at a time, and several other beds lie unoccupied along the walls. Some of us sit on them, and the more playful ones lie down on them and stretch out fully, yawning grandiosly. The remainder of us glare at our companions and refocus our attention on Kenji. Now is not the time to be playing.  
  
Not that Kenji himself is all that interesting. As I said, he's just starting to wake up, and he isn't doing much other than shake, shudder, and blink at the moment. We wait a few minutes, as he finally awakens from his dazed sleep into a semi-conscious state. One eye cracks open. We hear an almost silent gasp, then light footsteps. We turn to see who it is.  
  
It is Uriko, who has been sitting nervously outside the waiting room for the whole time Kenji has been in here, silently praying and praying to God that he will be alright. There are many things she has to tell him- her feelings for him, the ache in her heart as she watches him lie there- but also a question she must ask, a question she thinks even as she enters the room: [Why? Why, Kenji? What made you hurt yourself, try to remove your life from mine? What? Was it something I did? Something someone else did? Oh God, help me to be strong... Tell me, Kenji!]  
  
These thoughts run through her mind as she runs into the hospital room. Normally, it is locked to all save nurses or doctors, but Alice has a cardkey that grants her access to all the hospital rooms, and she gave it to Uriko before she left for the bathroom. Yugo is in his own gender's respective bathroom as well, trying to soothe his aching fist with cold running water (his fist hurts where he used it as a makeshift battering ram) and desperately trying to stay awake. He's splashing water in his face now, weariness engulfing him, and he stands before the bathroom mirror and sighs. Alice herself is weeping in the other bathroom, her heart broken for poor Kenji, for her little sister Uriko, for her love and friend Yugo. Alice is an extremely kind soul, her heart an overflowing well of love and hope and sympathy. Sometimes, that causes her more grief than joy, but even if she had a choice, she would never give it up. It is too precious to her, and she believes that by being a kind heart, she lives more and feels more than others. Maybe it's true. It certainly seems that way.  
  
There are many who would think it odd that everyone except Uriko is gone, off on some other business. But then again....  
  
Uriko has been praying for some time alone with Kenji, so that they may talk without interruptions or interference. And they say the Lord works in mysterious ways.  
  
Returning our minds and senses to this room from it's wanderings in areas both physical and theological, we see Uriko fumble with the card key for a second (confused and worried minds do not work all that well) and then, as she finally puts it rightside up and inserts it into the lock, open the door. She steps inside, almost running but not quite, her feet muffled in the slippers she's wearing. She had not had time to grab anything else before jumping in Alice's car with Yugo (Alice herself had ridden on the ambulance, explaining to the EMTs- both friends of hers- exactly what she'd done and what had happened, to the best of her knowledge). Yugo had been almost frantic to follow the ambulance, almost as if he might become lost without it to guide him, though he knew full well where the hospital was. Uriko was still in her kimono, and though normally she'd be embarassed to be wearing such a thing in public, she finds that at the moment she couldn't care less about it. Kenji is all she can think about.  
  
As she approaches him, he says something, in a guttural voice that does not sound at all like his own.  
  
" So. I... stopped you."  
  
Kenji's open right eye, on the opposite side from where Uriko now stands breathless, looks towards the closed window through which we entered.  
  
" Still.... night..."  
  
The guttural voice is strange, and hearing it with mortal senses is disconcerting; hence, we can be forgiven our momentary lapse in thought. This is Bakuryu, speaking directly with Kenji's body. In it's half-state of sleep and wakefulness, the body is fair game for both parts of Kenji's shattered mind.  
  
As if to prove us right, Kenji speaks now, identifying his other, much to Uriko's horror. Her mouth hangs open, as she fears for the man (boy? What do you call such as him, neither man nor boy, yet both just the same?) she loves.  
  
" I failed... damn you, Bakuryu..."  
  
Bakuryu speaks again, this time his voice slightly mocking and triumphant.  
  
" Damn me? You're the one who... tried to damn yourself... through suicide, Kenji..."  
  
The eye rolls back towards the ceiling. Kenji speaks again. His voice is old, tired, sad.  
  
" I'm... already damned... lost..."  
  
Bakuryu cuts in, chuckling.  
  
" Doesn't mean... you have to drag me... with you... just... let go... let me rule... you'll never have to worry about anything again... I'll take care of everything..."  
  
Kenji's voice again. This time it carries a sharper, almost frantic edge as he refutes Bakuryu's words.  
  
" Never!... That's why I.... tried to kill myself.... to end YOU.... to rid the world of your evil..."  
  
" Of course, you now have to consider," Bakuryu says, mulling it over with himself, " that .... I may be YOUR evil..."  
  
" Kenji!" Uriko cries, finally unable to stand anymore of this lunatic conversation. " Kenji!"  
  
Kenji and Bakuryu both snap awake, and in their surprise they move with complete disregard for the various wires and IV's inserted into their skin. They sit up with a jerk, propelling themselves up, and propping themselves in a half-upright position with their left elbow. As they glare at Uriko she sees two souls in their eyes. In the right eye, Bakuryu's eye, she sees hate and fear and lust; in the left eye, Kenji's, she sees hopelessness and despair. And, somewhere deep in that brown eye, love. Love for her. For what she means to him.  
  
Then, as suddenly as they rose, they fall back down. Kenji takes over (his mind is stronger than Bakuryu's when he is fully awake) and lays there, tears beginning to form beneath his now-closed eyelids.  
  
" Kenji..." Uriko says, stepping closer to him, one hand stretched out to touch him... but she's so afraid, so very afraid, of that other in him, of Bakuryu... she waits, hesitant, wanting to comfort but afraid to touch.  
  
" Even you find me horrendous," Kenji says, self-mockery and hate tinging his voice with laughter. It is the voice of a lost soul. " Guess I should have expected that..."  
  
" I don't find you horrendous," Uriko says, moving her head to the side to study him better. " Not at all."  
  
" Bullshit," Kenji says fiercely, his voice so full of an unexpected, fiery rage that Uriko steps back, afraid that Bakuryu has returned. Kenji opens his eyes and turns to look at her, raising his head to spit the words at her. " Look at the way you're acting. Stepping back from me- me!- afraid to come near me. Afraid... of me."  
  
Uriko almost steps back again, fear of Kenji pushing her and telling her to run away... but she casts it aside and plunges forth with courage. She steps towards him, her footsteps slow and silent. As she reaches Kenji, she stops for a moment, gathering her courage, and then leans down and places her arms beneath him. Confused and caught unawares, Kenji does nothing to stop her. She draws him into a fierce hug, holding him close to her, and places her head above his own. She has left her neck open on purpose. If Kenji wishes to kill or harm her, she is now solely in his power. She is fast, but even her speed will not be enough to allow her to dodge a blow from this distance. One sharp, swift jab to the neck, and she will pass out unconscious. One bite, and her jugular will be torn open (one of the worst habits of Bakuryu's- one that tortures Kenji in his dreams- was that of drinking the spills from his kills) and her lifeblood will flow out.  
  
" I won't be afraid," Uriko says, holding him tight. " Not of you. I love you, Kenji..."  
  
This action, so unexpected, so kind (and to this soul whose entire life has been one composed of misery and pain, any kindness is a blessing), breaks down all the barriers in Kenji's mind. Bakuryu is, for the moment, driven out. He puts his own arms around Uriko (ignoring the pull of the needles as they leave his skin; they make little sucking noises as they leave, causing all of us to momentarily wince) and buries his head in her neck. And he cries. Tears are both the scourge and boon of mankind; they tear us apart inside, make us sobbing, helpless wrecks of ourselves... but they also heal, and leave us feeling a little less empty inside.  
  
Kenji cries, and Uriko holds him. Soon, his tears dry up, and become nothing more than sniffles. Uriko holds him, glad that no one has come in on them, because this is a private moment, one they wish to share with each other alone (we are here, of course, but since she doesn't know that, we don't count. Besides, this is what we're supposed to do.) As Kenji finally quiets down, she asks him the question that has been filling her mind.  
  
" Kenji? Why did you do it? Don't you know that I love you? That Yugo loves you? And Alice and Gado.... all of them, don't you know we love you?"  
  
Kenji holds her as she rocks him slowly, for once blessedly alone in his mind (for Bakuryu is always there, always mocking, always just below the surface of his skin) and stays silent. He doesn't know how to answer her question; he doesn't even want to try. He just wants to stay like this, forever.  
  
Outside, Alice has left the bathroom (Yugo is at a coffee machine farther down the hall, trying to stay awake as best as he can) and is walking down the halls when a doctor accosts her and asks about the patient in Room 270. Yes, he says to her reply, he knows that she has someone here, but he must know about 270's medication....  
  
In this room, as we watch with an apprehensive, cautious sort of joy (because this seems to be the first step towards some kind of healing for this tortured soul) Uriko places her head against Kenji. She nudges him, trying to pry some sort of answer from him. " Kenji? Don't you know?"  
  
Kenji pushes himself harder against her, and says something against her skin. She didn't catch it, but we did. He said yes.  
  
" Kenji?"  
  
" Yes," he repeats, louder this time. " I did know you loved me. And that's why I tried to kill myself. To remove my evil from your lives...." He pushes his face against her, drawing comfort from her strength. " I'm a monster...."  
  
" No, you aren't... you're not to blame for what you did as Bakuryu. In your place, anybody would have done the same thing. You were just a child, Kenji. Nobody should be hurt like that..."  
  
Kenji sighs against her, his breath a puff of wind against her neck. " You don't understand... the things I've done...."  
  
" You had to, to survive. No one blames you."  
  
" No," Kenji says fiercely, his pain flooding forward as he opens up this festering wound in him, as he lets the poison that has grown so long within him out. " I didn't have to do it to survive. Busuzima ordered me to kill, but he never ordered me to torture. I... have done things you can't even imagine. I used to...."  
  
Uriko tries to hush him, to tell him that it doesn't matter, that who he was is not who he is, but he will not be stopped and bulls on ahead with his story.  
  
" I used to kill any bystanders as well. But I'd play with them first.... I loved hunting them. Hunting humans. I once tore a man's head off with my claws and threw it at his wife... I killed her with her own husband's dead skull. I thought it was funny, at the time."  
  
Uriko continues holding him, her will strong despite what she has heard. It is faltering somewhat, but for now at least, she holds him.  
  
" I always enjoyed disemboweling others, gutting them like fish. It was so entertaining to watch their guts fall to the floor..." Kenji's voice grows guttural, as he drifts into memories that are Bakuryu's. Despite her fear, Uriko stays with him, feeling that she is the one link to the real world and the better things he has left. He continues his story, voice growing foul and weary with evils remembered, " Some of those I killed... I let them live for days. I would find them, take them to an abandoned warehouse or building of some sort, and have fun. I tore a man's eyes out once, just to see if he would survive. He did- for a little while." Kenji raises his head to look at Uriko's eyes. In them he expects to see condemnation and hate. Before his gaze reaches hers, he finishes, " Knowing all this, can you still tell me I'm not a monster?"  
  
And as he raises his vision to meet hers, he sees the truth in her eyes. He scares her. But she will still stand by him, no matter what. Because she does not blame him. Not for the monster he was or the monster he could be. She loves him. And she will not leave him in his weakness.  
  
" Yes, I can," she says to him.  
  
Kenji buries his face in Uriko's arms again, and tears flow freely from both of them. We smile, bittersweet smiles, but smiles nonetheless.  
  
Even darkness can become light.  
  
We wait for Yugo and Alice to return. Our mission is not yet finished.... but we have just a few more hours to go.  
  
-R and R please!


	7. The Hunter

Hey people. Silver here. I've had one hell of a busy week, so I haven't been able to update as fast as I like.... but bear with me, people! I guarantee that I'll try to update faster after this.  
  
Hmmm...  
  
To the Review Cave!  
  
VGuyver (and I hope I've gotten your name right, my internet's on the fritz at the moment): Wow! A new reviewer. Good to have you aboard, laddie! Thanks for all your comments and notes- they are quite helpful. I agree on the "rushed" chapter, but I couldn't figure out a way to lengthen it, so it ended up as it was. Your notes are quite good and very helpful.  
  
By the by- I hate Hudson's "canon" history. I've decided to screw with it on my own.  
  
A Front Mission 4? (begins drooling) I loved Front Mission 3. It had one of the greatest storylines in the world, and the choice you make at the beginning of the game (the "go with Ryogo or not" one) is actually an extremely creepy choice. If you don't believe me, think about this: That one, single decision completely decides whose side you are on. It changes the very course of history in the game. And you know what? That's realistic. Because a single choice can and will decide your entire life, even if it seems like a completely irrevelant, everyday thing at the time. A great, great turn-around from our old friends at Square.  
  
Besides, I love giant robots.... :)  
  
As for Busuzima and Shenlong- Busuzima's character never really fit with his supposed place in the story. If the SOB had actually managed to invent Zoanthropes, wouldn't he be a cold, stone-hearted scientist and not a weird goofball? I personally think that would be the case. As for ol' Shenlong, he is the most "gray" character in the game to me (and not just for his fur) and so I'm trying to write him like that. Interesting how you say I've switched them... didn't notice it myself, but I guess I have.  
  
Thanks for the compliments on my literary skills and my general level of intelligence. I love to read, and it has been a big help to me in my writing.  
  
One more thing- don't bash Yugo, I love the wolf! (whimper in background) Poor guy. Everybody hates him but me.... he's actually the character I fight with in BR3 tournaments, and so far I've kicked the ass of everyone I've met (with the exception of a Jenny player and a Long player, both of whom beat me once). His in-your-face fighting style (and the very fact that you are using him at all) completely throw people off balance. You'd think someone would like him....  
  
Tiger5913- Don't worry, my friend. The next chapter is up! And as for Kenji and Uriko- they were going out, but neither of them really opened up that much to the other. They were more like best friends than boyfriend/girlfriend, but had greater depths of feeling for each other than either of them realized.  
  
To all my other reviewers: Thanks and kudos to everybody! Sorry, but the 'net's on the fritz, and I'm not that up to date on my reviews.  
  
Ah well. Time to get on with the show.  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter Seven  
  
The Hunter  
  
Room 350, Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near both Ohgami and Nonomura households. 2:30 a.m. Night of the Mark.  
  
Uriko and Kenji have separated, realizing that if Yugo or Alice walked in that the moment would be ruined in their memories, and the separation came not a moment too soon. Alice walks in, followed by Yugo, who is suddenly extremely up and awake. He attributes it to the coffee he holds in his right hand, which is admittedly black (so black, in fact, that it looks more like oil than coffee). As Yugo and Alice walk in, both stop and look at Kenji for a moment, taking in his tear-streaked eyes and ruffled hair, the needles pulled out of his skin, the haunted look in his eyes. Alice walks calmly over to him and switches to her nurse personality, as she likes to call it; all business and no more compassion than must be shown to ease her patient into a cooperative mood. This personality is the only one she has that can actually deal with all she sees in a day; without it, she would be unable to continue working at the hospital, for her sympathetic nature would overwhelm her with tears for the fallen.  
  
" Kenji," she says softly, " I have to rehook the needles now. You've... lost a lot of blood."  
  
Kenji merely turns his face away from her and nods his head the barest bit. Alice begins rehooking the needles (astutely ignoring the small amount of blood that has dribbled onto the floor from them; we keep waiting for someone to step in it or at least notice it, but no one does). Kenji's eyes squint slightly as each needle enters his skin, but is otherwise silent.  
  
It is Yugo who breaks the silence, as he almost always does. As Alice finishes hooking the last needle into Kenji's skin, Yugo's voice comes out, weak and broken, completely unlike the joker's boom he usually uses.  
  
" Why?" he asks. " Why'd you do it, Kenji? What happened?"  
  
Inside his mind, Kenji hears Bakuryu (who surfaced the instant Uriko let go) and his mocking answer:  
  
[ Oh, nothing. Kenji's just nuts.]  
  
Ignoring his alter, Kenji says nothing. There is nothing to say.  
  
" Kenji," Yugo begins, searching inside himself for anything he can say that will make it easier for Kenji to open up to them. " Please.... tell us what's wrong! Is there something we can do?"  
  
[ Yeah, drive me out,] Bakuryu says amiably. Again ignoring his alter, Kenji continues to say nothing.  
  
" Please," Yugo begs, his voice on the verge of tears now. He is edging quite close to a full-blown breakdown, and it is the sound of his voice more than anything that makes Kenji open up.  
  
" You.... don't understand..." Kenji says, stammering it out into the room as Bakuryu's presence pulls up a metaphorical chair and plops down to watch the proceedings with great amusement, " what I am.... what I've done..."  
  
Uriko fears a repeat of the tales he told her, but before that can occur, a nurse runs into the room. She almost slams into the door, she is running so fast. All eyes (including our own) turn to the door. As she fits the key card into the slot, she runs in.  
  
" Alice," she says breathlessly, " I have bad news."  
  
" What?" Alice says, frightened. We, believing we know what it is, wait for confirmation from this nurse. We get up and spread our wings. It is almost time to fly.... almost.... not yet....  
  
" Some of your friends are here."  
  
Ah, that's our cue. We pick up our wings and fly.  
  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
Emergency Room, Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, Tokyo. 2:38 a.m.  
  
We left Alice and the nurse and so didn't catch the rest of the conversation, but can be reasonably confident it was a quick summing-up of the way our favorite felines look. We can even guess, reasonably, what she said. Probably something along the lines of "bad".  
  
And as we fly through the hallways (and walls if they happen to be in our way) we eventually come into sight of them. In the extremely bright white room that serves as the entrance to the extensive Emergency Care Unit of this hospital, we see Long and Gado being wheeled into various rooms where they will be treated for extreme electric shock (no surprise there). Shina, whose cuts and bruises are almost entirely healed, is quickly explaining to the nurse at the receiving office a story she cooked up on the way here. We hear part of the explanation as we swoop over her.  
  
" My father, Gado, and my friend, Long, were checking the fuse box in our house -it's a huge fuse box, connected to almost everything in the house except a generator we keep for emergencies- and something happened. Maybe they forgot to pull a switch or a fuse didn't blow in time... whatever happened, they both got fried. The lights flickered and I got nervous, so I ran down to the back room where the fuse box is located. They were both being fried...."  
  
The head nurse nods her head, having heard stories like this before. She thinks nothing special of this case- this day alone, a little boy's head was sawn off by a lawnmower blade that had freed itself of it's hinges and flown out, like some death blade of Hell, and cut into his neck, an old man had fallen over thirty stories when he'd tumbled out his window trying to water his hanging plants, and a girl of sixteen had born triplets right here in this waiting room. There is very little that surprises or shocks a nurse, and the less spectacular something is, the less likely it is she shall remember it later. Which is good for everyone involved; if she remembered, she might recall that the two men were not burnt as badly as they would be if the entire electrical system of an enormous house like the Mansion de Leo had actually been hooked up to them, even for a short amount of time. It takes less than a third of a second for a man to be killed when that amount of electricity is coursed through him, and the victims always end up looking like charred corpses. But the two men seemed to have suffered only a mild shock.  
  
It is good that the nurse will not remember these things.  
  
As Shina finishes up her story (detailing how she threw the main breaker switch, which was located a short distance from the fuse box, when she saw them suffering) we flap our wings and take off. There is much we do not know and are not allowed to see, but we know what Shina will do in the next few minutes. She will rush through the hospital to where her father and her boyfriend (though not lover; Shina is as cold about that as she is about most other things) and make sure they are all right. Then Alice will catch up to her, running to beat the devil, and more explanations will ensue, detailing both of the women's experiences tonight. As we take wing and fly, we even know the exact words they will use, though we will not hear them with our own ears. Though almost all of the future is a free and wild thing, made by our choices, there are times when certain choices have far-reaching effects that cause part of the future to be cast in stone.  
  
A good thing too. Saves us a lot of time.  
  
We take wing and fly.  
  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
Tokyo Sky, flying towards Stun's hideout in an abandoned warehouse. 2:45.  
  
We wing our way through the air, passing before the white moon without making the slightest mar on it's light. We fly through the air, and our presence is unknown to all but us. As we fly, we search with our minds throughout this place... and find what we are looking for. Stun, the insect Zoanthrope who holds in him more pain- and more promise- than any other Zoanthrope on the planet. As we wing through the sky we sense him, and veer off to put in our physical sight what we see with our minds.  
  
We catch up to him eventually, in another hideout of his, this time in an abandoned warehouse. It has none of the mystique of the factory, however; unlike that labrynthine maze of metal, machines, and gears (plus the strange spinning rushing aura of the place, that feeling of running when you are standing still, of whirring machines in silence) and merely feels like what it is; an empty metal shell, devoid of everything except a group of hobos by the entrance and two Zoanthropes in the back. The hobos are asleep near a small fire, and so did not see either Zoanthrope enter.  
  
As we flit in, Jenny has mostly recovered from the terrible pain of the Mark and is talking with Stun about it. They sit around no campfire, needing neither warmth or light. As we approach, they talk.  
  
" Should we tell the others?" Jenny asks, propping herself up against the wall and slowly moving her body, feeling her way through it to make sure nothing is broken (and to make sure nothing is going to flare up in pain again). " It might be some strange mutation they need to know about..."  
  
Stun nods, but something nags at him. " Jenny.... did you take any drugs recently? Anything at all, even something like a Tylenol?" Tylenol is not the exact word he used- this is Japan, after all, and they are speaking Japanese- but it is close enough for us to understand the general idea.  
  
" You think it's a reaction to something, maybe?" Jenny asks, catching on to what he means.  
  
" Maybe," he says. He really can't say for sure; just as he did in college and as a scientist, he is checking for all the possible answers. It's the way his mind works: search for every possible explanation, and when all other answers are gone, consider what is left the truth- impossibilities are merely improbabilites looked at in a different light.  
  
Very Sherlock Holmes-ish. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have been quite pleased.  
  
Jenny thinks for a moment, and as she continues her struggle to stand up, she says, " I did take one thing earlier today- a sleeping pill. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. But I took that hours ago." Much like her beast counterpart, Jenny sleeps most of the day.  
  
" Hmm... what was the dosage?"  
  
" Dosage?"  
  
" The milligrams of the drug..."  
  
Jenny merely gives him a blank stare, then says, " I don't remember. I don't usually read anything on pill bottles other than their name, you know."  
  
Stun grins despite himself at this reminder that not everyone else has a photographic memory- or reads everything in sight. " Okay, okay. Let's do this the simple way. How big was the pill?"  
  
" Real small.... maybe this big?" She squinches up her right hand's pointer finger and thumb to make a very small shape about a quarter of an inch big.  
  
" It's not big enough to have caused this, then," Stun says, putting his fist under his chin. With his callused pointer finger, he taps his chin thoughtfully and says, " Hmm.... the pill was too small. It would have dispersed throughout your body long before now. If it had been the cause of the mutation, we would have seen it before now. Anything else? Did you eat or drink something out of the ordinary today? Or any food or drink that smelled strange or tasted funny?"  
  
Jenny thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. " No."  
  
" Damn. I can't think of anything else at the moment... let's head to Alice's house. She might be able to think of something I can't."  
  
" Is that such a good idea? It is rather late in the night, Stun. I doubt they'll want to get woken up.... can we wait a few hours?" For some reason, Jenny received very bad vibes when she thought about going to Alice's house.  
  
Stun stares at her for a moment, not having really caught what she'd said (he had still been lost in his mind, thinking about Jenny's situation) and says, " What?"  
  
" I don't think we should go to Alice's," Jenny says, wondering even as she says it why she doesn't want to go to her friend's house. " I just get these bad feelings when I think about it..."  
  
Stun looks at her, and says, " Bad feelings? What do you mean?"  
  
" I just feel bad... it's stupid, I know, but I don't think we should go to Alice's tonight."  
  
Why does she not want to go there? What could she be thinking? Try as we might, we can get no more out of her mind than she herself can; a confused half-sense of danger at Alice's and a feeling of safety where she is.  
  
" If you're sure..." Stun says, his eyes narrowing as he ponders this new development. " I guess we'll stay here, then. Unless you want to head to Gado's?"  
  
" No," she says, " I want to stay here."  
  
" Alright..." Stun is obviously wondering about his friend's overall sanity, but he will obey her wishes and stay put. As confused as he is about Jenny's reluctance to leave, we flap our wings and fly. Our destination is the Nonomura house, where a freak of both biology and cybernetics is currently searching for a blood trail....  
  
One that will lead him straight to Kenji Ohgami and more importantly, Bakuryu.  
  
-R and R please! And the next chapter will be up soon. How soon is an unknown at the moment- but I guarantee that this story will receive special treatment in the oncoming days! See you later! 


	8. Fervor of the Insane

Hey people. Silver here. As I promised, this story is getting special treatment; I think I'll skip updating my other stories (with the exception of "Walking Through Dream", which will get an update after I post this) until I'm through with this one. And now, to let you in on a secret...  
  
Tiger already knows about this, but I've decided to share it with you guys as well. I'm planning on opening a second BR story that will be a sequel to this story and a prequel to "Whisper in the Winds". The story will probably begin this winter, when I'm through with most other fanfics, and the current working title is "Truth and Lies". The title, like most aspects of the story, is only a hold-over until I get a better idea.  
  
Now, for reviews:  
  
Tiger5913: (picks Bakuryu up, dusts him off) Hey, Tiger, I need this guy for my story! C'mon, lass, put the pianos down! (ducks pianos hurled by insane Tiger) Ack! (runs away, comes back with ax) Bad Tiger! Bad! (Chops pianos up).  
  
Whew. As I was saying....  
  
You got something wrong in your review. I think you thought Stun was going after Kenji- he's not. Kohryu is. Stun is a GOOD GUY in my story, despite the fact that you've convinced every other BR author on ff.net that he's evil! (glares at you) Seriously, if you had any idea of the influence you've wielded in the realm of BR fanfiction, I think you'd faint. I read a review once stating that the reason everyone hates Cronos is that (and I quote) " Tiger making fun of hinted Uriko/Cronos romance in BR. Since we all like to play follow the leader, the rest of us hate him too." Sheesh, woman! What have you done to deserve accolades like this?!? I wish I could control an entire genre on ff.net too... (cries)  
  
On another note, the blood on the floor wasn't Kenji's; it was from the needles that were stuck in his arms. They painted the floor, not him. And as for bottling things up- true!  
  
Don't worry. Kenji may have lost his will to live, but ol' Baky hasn't... (evil grin)  
  
Thanks for kudos, and I'll try getting on AIM, but I'm usually typing these things at nine p.m. or so, and putting them up at eleven p.m., so by then you're probably asleep (three hour difference makes it one o clock over there, I think). And if you're not, then you should be. :)  
  
By the by.... my weapon of preference is a longsword. (sharpening noises) Update soon, 'kay? Or suffer the consequences. (anime sword-drawing "ching!" noise)  
  
Soundwood: Wow! Another new reviewer! Yay! (dances around) Don't know how you heard about this story, but I'm glad you found it. Thanks for your reviews and especially your compliments on Shen and Long. And about leaving a bunch of reviews- do it please! It inflates my ego. (sound of ego swelling in background)  
  
I understand what you say about moving while you read- I do it too. Makes it hard to finish Stephen King books (I'm his biggest fan, by the by :) but I find that I just can't sit down when I read.  
  
By the by- the comment on Long's virginity actually isn't mine, it's Tiger's. Read her BR fanfic "Unleashing the Beast" (or something close to that... my memory's quite bad:) and you'll see where I got the idea from.  
  
(reads the above) Heh heh... Guess I play "follow the leader" too... Ah well. All hail Tiger! (snappy salute)  
  
Indigo Siren: (grabs forks) One for you, one for me, and one for Hannibal Lecter. Dinner time!  
  
Uri-chan: Thanks for reviewing!  
  
Okay, enough of that. It's....  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter Eight  
  
Fervor of the Insane  
  
Nonomura house, near Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. 2:50 a.m., Night of the Mark.  
  
We flit in, silent as shadows, and our presence disturbs nothing in this house. Yet, despite this complete inconspicuity, the creature inside turns its head and snorts, mumbling somthing to itself as it does so. Unable to perceive more of us than it already has (and did it perceive us? Or did some random portion of its mind jerk at just that moment, causing it to look around?), it turns around and continues its search. As the creature looks about the still-lighted household (Alice and Uriko forgot to turn the lights out in the subsequent events surrounding Kenji's attempted suicide) we watch it, and our horror grows. This is something straight out of nightmare- and not something we were prepared to see. Whatever this thing is before us, it is completely beyond what we expected to see.  
  
Its skin is broken and distorted, revealing muscle in some places, bone in others, and in the most horrific place of all, the torn skin that would have covered the back of its left hand is open and shows a hole through which we can see the creature's skeleton- and the wires and gears that go through all of it. No blood flows through this thing, for it is dead, as dead as the bodies in the cemetery where Xion changed and became the Unborn, as dead as the dreams that poor soul may once have had. A continual low-grade, almost subaudible whirring sound emits from the creature, as gears that should never have been built spin and give rise to the strange jerks and sudden motions the creature goes through even as it searches. The creature mutters to itself constantly, its voice a distorted, thick, slurring thing through which we can distinguish no individual words, just a sense of continual murmuring. Its teeth are long and sharp, and some of them- bone covering worn off or otherwise lost to the depths of time- are revealed as the hunks of metal they really are. Saliva constantly drips between them, thick and runny, seeming less like spittle and more like acid from a serpent's fang. Two ears- or the remains of two long ears- float above its, but they are twisted, blasted, and torn as well, the small antennae inside them revealed in the patches where the skin is gone. The eyes blaze red, and as we float around this creature, attempting to gaze into its mind, they seem to track us, following us as we float about it.   
  
This thing gives us the chills, and well it should. This is Kohryu, a freak that Busuzima actually did not help create until the very end of his Zoanthrope project. Busuzima despises robotics and advanced cybernetics, thinking of them as mere mechanical copies of biology that can never match the original. He jokingly told a colleague that it was the humanity's ultimate "play God" profession, an attempt to create new life rather than modify old (he said this with full understanding of the irony in his statement; he, after all, was playing God in far worse ways than any mere roboticist ever could). Kohryu was built as a first-generation cyborg by a sister company of Tylon's. Busuzima, bored one night with his current subjects (a young Kenji Ohgami was there, along with a small girl named Uriko Nonomura), went over to the nearby lab and looked in on the projects there. Kohryu, body torn apart as the scientists placed wires in him, lay there unattended (the night guards were unconcerned with Busuzima, who had been given the highest level of clearance in Tylon and was considered a resource of the company.) Busuzima had been struck by an idea, and soon after wheedled his way into putting Kohryu, half-finished mechanical parts and all, into his program. Afterwards, the world's only cyborg Zoanthrope was constructed. Kohryu was an immense failure, and Busuzima never experimented with cybernetics again... though he often thought of his "metal zombie", as he jokingly put it, especially wondering what had happened after he let it loose to roam the streets. After the ZLF and other failures, Busuzima caught Kohryu again, but lost him several weeks ago. The loss didn't bother him much; Kohryu was, at best, an iffy weapon and at worst a severe liability. Kohryu's insanity prevents him from having much use to Busuzima, who likes solid results. Henceforth, when Kohryu disappeared from the sewers where Busuzima had been keeping him, Busuzima was more glad than worried. If he'd known who had stolen him, he might have worried more; the Mishiyama Corp., under orders of it's CEO, had stolen Kohryu. The CEO had received a few messages (and I shall not tell you more, save to say they were written in the blood of a child) that Kohryu might be useful to him; and so Kohryu remained in the Mishiyama Corp.'s headquarters, on the top floor, until tonight. When he was let free to hunt down someone that Xion (in a telepathic conversation with the CEO, an hour ago, which we would have heard but for the little incident that took place there) had identified as being a potential threat.  
  
Kohryu looks around and sniffs, his broken down and bleeding body identifying the smell as Kenji's (in his black, twisted mind, Kohryu thinks of nothing so complex; he merely identifies the smell as "Target") and begins to follow it. The rain that is now washing through Japan has not washed away all the blood, and now there are many more scents for Kohryu to follow: Alice's, Uriko's, Yugo's, the men on the ambulance, the ambulance itself....  
  
Kohryu turns, and the shaking, ambling form walks out the door. It stands on the pavement, bends its knees, and then leaps high into the air, crossing enormous distances with bounds that shake it's ailing body and threaten to make the entire system shut down. But the creature continues to work, as it has for many years now, working because it has no other choice but to work.  
  
We lift our wings and follow it out. The door of the Nonomura house flutters in the wind behind us.  
  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near heart of Tokyo, Japan. 3:00 a.m.  
  
We fly far faster than Kohryu leaps, and hence get to the hospital a few minutes before he does. We sit here and wait, quite uneasy, wondering when Kohryu will enter this scene... wondering what will happen after. As I said before, the future is a great and winding thing, and there are so many paths it could take... our heroes could crush Kohryu within seconds, or Kohryu could best them all and slay them here. And then there are all the paths in between; Kenji slain but the others unhurt, Yugo killed while a crying Uriko bests Kohryu, Uriko slain and a half-mad Kenji tearing Kohryu apart. A million different futures, stretching out from this one moment.  
  
We wait, while Yugo and Kenji talk. Uriko is sitting on a nearby bench, her mind still filtering out all she heard from Kenji and listening to him and Yugo with only half an ear. Even in our worry, we perform our mission and listen.  
  
" We don't blame you," Yugo says, spreading his hands helplessly. " You were just a child, Kenji. All of us have done horrible things. Long was an assassin too, and he doesn't beat himself up about it! No one's perfect. No one should be. We just try to live our lives the best we can.... try to float on when life attempts to sink us..." Yugo shakes his head, unable to think of anything to say, and as this jester, this king of words, stands mute, Kenji speaks.  
  
" But... what if you can't float on? What if you've sunk and there's nothing left to do but fall... isn't it better to sink quickly? To try and spare those you love the pain of watching you slowly fade away... isn't that better?"  
  
Yugo shakes his head, tears threatening to shut him up permanently, and before they can do so, he manages to say, " But Kenji, that's what we're here for. What friends are for. To pull you up when you sink. To help you get back on your feet. That's why we're here! You're not alone!"  
  
With this, Yugo breaks down, and tears flow from the normally valiant boxer's eyes. Something else breaks down too, causing everyone in the room (including us) to cry out in surprise. The window shatters, and in leaps Kohryu. The jerking, shaking form turns its head surprisingly fast, and its eyes lock onto Kenji's. With a leaping, shuddering movement, it launches itself at him.  
  
But someone else has lauched themselves as well; Uriko tackles Kohryu, her pretty mouth twisted into a snarl, hair flying as she grabs his legs with her hands and knocks him backward towards the window he just came through. Kohryu falls onto his back, and Uriko rears up, body already changing as she prepares a backhand blow. A full-fledged snarl emits from her newly-fanged mouth, and the light of change comes over her. When it finishes, mere milliseconds after it starts, her prepared backhand fist is now a claw. She swipes it over Kohryu's face. Four small white lines appear in the dead flesh of its face; it takes no notice.  
  
Kohryu's entire form jerks, and Uriko is thrown off it. Kohryu gets up, and mutters something into the dead air. A small flame appears before Kohryu, and as Kohryu concentrates its half-dead, half-mad facilities, the flame spreads and becomes roughly the size of a basketball. Kohryu mutters something else, and the flame hurls across the room towards Uriko. She ducks it, and the flying fireball strikes the bulletproof Plexiglass wall behind her. The wall hisses and sizzles as the flame melts it.  
  
Yugo has recovered from his former surprise and tears, and hurls himself across the room at Kohryu as well. He leaps over Kenji, who is both shocked and yet strangely unsurprised at Kohryu's entrance; it seems that some part of him was expecting an attack of some sort, ever since he woke up from his attempted suicide. Unbeknownst to him, the knife line on his left hand has reformed itself into a Crest. The one clean line has become three jagged claw marks, and they are starting to glow. Nobody notices this in the heat of the situation but us, though.  
  
Yugo punches Kohryu, falling easily into his boxer's pose, teeth exposed in a growl as he slugs at the monster before him. He changes in mid-attack, and finishes a simple left-left-right combination with a claw swipe that knocks Kohryu into a nearby wall. The jittering monstrosity looks at him and opens its mouth, emitting an unearthly scream that is so high-pitched it is impossible for normal humans to hear; in his beast form, Yugo can hear it just fine, and the scream's sheer intensity drowns out all thought in his mind. He staggers back, clamping his claws over ears that are starting to bleed. As he falls backwards, Kohryu finishes his scream and stands up, jittering. He begins advancing for Kenji again.  
  
Uriko is up, however, and she launches herself across the room at him again. She lands on his face, clawing and scratching him to pieces, and when he tries to shake her off she valiantly hangs on. Kohryu falls back, body shaking and jittering even more as he tries to remove the stubborn half-beast from his face. The back of his legs quickly comes into contact with a bed, and in something that is much like a flash of inspiration for this creature, he comes up with a plan. It grabs the lamp that is sitting by the bed and slams it into Uriko's forehead, bulb and all. Uriko cries out as her hair begins to smolder from the hot embers now blazing in her hair. She falls off Kohryu, onto the floor, and rolls out of harm's way before stopping to brush her face off as fast as she can. As she shakes her head and wipes away the painful shards, Kohryu begins heading towards Kenji again.  
  
Kenji watches Kohryu advance with an almost dreamlike acceptance. Here, finally, is the death he has been looking for. Here, finally, is a way to die and leave this world without shame. He is already wounded; it would be acceptable to the others that he simply did not have the strength to fight. It would be an almost honorable way to go.  
  
As Kohryu advances, the spell is broken by Uriko. She leaps onto Kohryu's back, clawing and screaming, and when Kohryu lifts her up and slams her into a wall, Kenji wakes from his daze.  
  
[ Uriko!] his mind cries out. [Uriko, I'm coming...]  
  
Kenji raises himself up, determined to fight now, not fighting for himself but fighting for Uriko, and as he raises himself up to fight....  
  
he falls, because he really is too weak to fight. Laying there helplessly, feeling the weakness in his arms, Kenji can only watch as Uriko and Kohryu fight. Uriko is strong, well-trained, and stubborn; but she is also no match for Kohryu. The cyborg Zoanthrope, despite the fact that it clings to some form of consciousness with only a thread, despite the fact that it lacks true self-awareness, is incredibly strong, and resistant to most forms of attack; even now, as we watch, Uriko launches into a flying kick that would have completely crushed the intestines of any normal human who happened to receive it (and would have greatly damaged any Zoanthrope in the way) and which has almost no effect on Kohryu. His innards are mostly gone anyway, replaced by wire and metal. Kohryu strikes Uriko with a backhand slap that sends her spining away. As she falls, we see blood glitter in the air, along with a small fang that could only be one of her teeth. Kohryu's form twitches around again, ready to slay Kenji. The hospital bed Kenji was sitting on is suddenly in the air and striking him before we can blink. Kenji had leaped off the bed, grabbed it, and swung it in the time it took Kohryu to turn around.  
  
We blink. That ninja boy is fast. Though Kenji thought he had lacked strength, seeing Uriko's blood has given him new strength. As Kenji lunges forward, hands moving in the odd circles and symbols of Ninjitsu, he is little more than a blur even to us, we whose sole purpose in life is to watch and record that which we see. As Kenji attacks, we watch with our interest somewhat dimmed; it is almost a guarantee that Kenji shall win this fight.  
  
But almost is not certain; for even as we think this fight is over, it starts all over again. Kohryu's form jerks once, and the light of change comes over him. Metal shrieking as the body and form it had been made for changes, Kohryu turns into a strange, shelled beast that almost looks like a refugee from one of the giant robot animes that are so popular in Japan. That, however, is not our main concern. Our main concern is the enormous claws that have replaced its hands. Busuzima gave Kohryu's dead form Kenji's Zoanthrope DNA, seeking what he had believed at the time would be the smallest change from a human form, so as to prevent too much damage to the internal cybernetics when Kohryu transformed. He was wrong, of course; the enormous mutated claws which are the hallmark of Mole Zoanthropes the world over are the least of the major changes the body undergoes. Kohryu looks impressive in this form, but he may actually be weaker while mutated; the metal in his body is now compressed and shifted, close to the breaking point. A few well-placed blows may crush this creature and end its unnatural life.  
  
But Kenji is not strong enough to do that. He strikes and strikes, staying in human form, hands becoming knives or fists or spears, circling his target and keeping the undead beast off-balance and unable to counter, but still he cannot kill the creature- cannot even harm it, for his blows are weak and lack strength. Desperate, Kenji flies through the air and kicks the creature's face, and receives nothing but a claw swipe in return. Dodging it with a backwards flip, Kenji lands on the ground, glaring up at his opponent, one hand on the ground and the other thrown behind him, reaching for shuriken that are not there (Kenji's training is taking over in his panic). His body aches and his mind burns. His breath is coming out in short little gasps that do not give him enough air. Desperate, he clings to consciousness.  
  
Kohryu twitches again, and as it raises a claw to wipe Kenji's face off with, Yugo barrels into him, snarling and biting. The wolf receives four claw points in the gut and howls with pain (though he can't hear his own scream; Yugo has been deafened by Kohryu's scream). As Yugo is thrown back by the monstrosity before him, Kenji feels consciousness slip away, and his hand slips. He falls.  
  
Laying on the ground, he looks over and sees Uriko spit blood out of her mouth and shakily stand up, ready to strike Kohryu as soon as she sees an opening. She leaps, claws out, and is thrown back down again as Kohryu slams Yugo into her. The two Zoanthropes collapse in a heap.  
  
Kenji, with the part of his mind still capable of thought, turns to the one person in this room who has yet to participate in this fight.  
  
[ Bakuryu!] he screams with his mind. [ I need you!]  
  
- R & R please! 


	9. And In Darkness We Dream

Hey everybody. It's me, Silverlocke980, once again prepared to bring you the joy that is "Night of the Mark!" (Cue trumpet flourish).  
  
(Scratches head) Okay, so maybe it's not that good... but still! I am bringing it to you! Nice and hot! Woooo! (dances)  
  
Anyway, to the reviewers:  
  
VGuyver: (smacks head) Damn! I knew there was something I left out of the last chapter... thanks for pointing it out to me. Likewise, sorry about the female reference. Odd, considering how I thought you were male before you said anything... must have slipped up :).  
  
Thanks for the notes on Kohryu. I always thought he was the stupidest damn thing they'd done in the game (how the hell do you make a Robotech Zoanthrope? Anybody know?) but hey, if he's there, why not use him. Besides, I've had the idea in my head for a decaying monstrosity for some time now, and Kohryu seemed like the best way to write one.   
  
Front Mission 3 was a crazy cool game. Never played Xenogears (I've heard it's got a lot of religious elements, so I'm a little "ehhh" towards it anyway, since most people can't add religious things without making them "evil" or "backwards" in some way) but have seen the rave reviews it and the prequel (Xenosaga Episode 1) received. 'Course, FM 3's beat by Wild ARMS 3, but then again, nothing can stand up to the coolness that is WA3. I love that game. (Big stupid grin)  
  
Ah well. Thanks for reviewing!  
  
Tiger: What's wrong with bumping up Bakuryu's ego? I like the murderer. He cheers me up on bad days. :) Don't worry, Tiger; the Bakuryu stuff will resolve itself in a most beautiful way (one that harkens back to a special little RPG you once played....) in the sequel. It won't get resolved here much, but that's okay; I don't need it resolved just yet.  
  
And if you're confused, here's a hint: the main character was also called the "Rude Hero".I think you'll get it soon. ;)  
  
Soundwood: (smiles) Read your profile, kid. Very nice. Glad to know I'm being stalked! (chuckles) Ah well. I read about your own original character, and I must say I'm impressed. I'm seeing echoes of myself in her (the weight from the polar bear form harkens back to Yugo's wolf heat weakness) but she seems to be a very strong, very unique character to base a fic on. And....  
  
I don't usually do this, but I've decided to extend a hand to you. If you ever need help, Soundwood, I'm willing to give you ideas, storylines, characters, and just about anything else you'll need (I even work well as a sounding board :) to write your story. I'll understand if you think this is incredibly overbearing of me to offer this, but it's just a gesture of friendship. My e-mail's on if you want to talk, but remember this: I'm very busy, both on the Net and in the "real world" (How I hate that term...), so don't think I'm not listening when three days pass without e-mails.  
  
As for Kohryu- I screwed that up. Kohryu doesn't bleed (note that, when Uriko slashed him, only four little lines appeared on his face instead of bleeding gashes)... thanks for the reminder.  
  
Kudos to everybody who reviewed! If I forgot you, blame the heart and not the head.  
  
So! It's...  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter Nine  
  
And In Darkness We Dream  
  
Room 350, Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near heart of Tokyo, Japan. 2:48 a.m., Night of the Mark.  
  
Kenji has let out a silent call into this room, and as a team of doctors and nurses gather outside, trying to figure out what has happened here (they've been hearing all kinds of noises, and about a minute ago- about the time Kohryu screamed- the windows all over the hospital rattled) it seems to him that time slows down and all the world spins to a stop. Which is does, for him- and here I will break off for a second, to talk of something that humans have suspected for centuries but never really understood.  
  
Time is a man-made thing. Time has no existence, no meaning, no purpose in the eyes of a flower, born to live and die in one year- time has no power over a star, born to live for millenia and support the life of others. Time does not exist, save in the minds of humans. Henceforth...  
  
In Kenji's mind, what is about to happen will take minutes. In the "real flow" of time, what will happen takes barely a second.  
  
Let us go into his mind.  
  
We spin and the world falls apart...  
  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
Kenji's Mind. No time.  
  
Kenji stands on a black, broken wasteland dotted by fires. Every so often a tree is placed in these fields, with the dummies he trained upon (in those nightmare days when he was but a child under Busuzima's control) hanging from them, eyes made of jelly to mimic the popping sensation that occurs when one drives one's thumbs into an opponent's eyes. In like manner, bundles of sticks were stuffed into the dummies arms and legs, to allow students to fully mimic the act of breaking those limbs. This is Bakuryu's home, and whether Kenji likes to admit it or not, there is a lot of him left here- left in the training rooms and darkness that Busuzima preferred when teaching his young pupil. Left in the pain and torment of being forced to kill others, mostly captured prisoners, whenever Busuzima ordered him to. Left... here...  
  
" Well, well, well. Fancy seeing you here."  
  
Kenji turns around, and behind him, an exact replica in body but an exact opposite in soul, Bakuryu stands. Unlike Kenji, who is wearing a hooded jacket and pants (before any of this occured, hooded jackets were his favorite attire- as you already know, Kenji has shyness and people issues), Bakuryu is wearing the half-armor Busuzima designed for him. Busuzima had trained Kenji in Ninjitsu because of the great emphasis on stealth it required (that, and he wanted to finally train someone as a real Ninja, not as a commercialized toy), but he realized that even the best spies sometimes get caught, often through no fault of their own. So Busuzima built this armor, based off of old Samurai designs (the Ninja were many things, but blacksmithing was a talent far beyond them) for the sole purpose of deflecting bullets. The armor was made of Kevlar mixed with small slivers of titanium designed to strengthen it. The way it was designed, Kenji could get shot in any unprotected part and, so long as the rest of him was functioning, he would survive. For obvious reasons, Busuzima was not afraid of Kenji being wounded in hand-to-hand combat.  
  
The armor still exists in the "real world", inside Yugo's house where he has kept it since the day he met Kenji. Yugo has been keeping the armor for reasons he himself has never really been sure of (Yugo has often felt that he should just throw it away, but he never quite gets to it), but Kenji does not know this. Kenji associates the armor, just as he associates his beast form and fighting style, with Bakuryu. He will not wear it, in the real world or in his mind.  
  
Kenji speaks. His voice is slow and solemn, weak and hurt.  
  
" Bakuryu. Come with me. I need you."  
  
Bakuryu cocks his head to the side, looking at his other with amused interest.  
  
" Oh really? And why do you need me? What can the almighty Kenji not do by himself?" Bakuryu grins at him.  
  
" I cannot defeat Kohryu," Kenji says. " Help me."  
  
" You could if you changed," Bakuryu says.  
  
" You know I cannot do that," Kenji says, slowly shaking his head. " That power belongs to you."  
  
Because Kenji so fears Bakuryu, he fears anything connected with Bakuryu. And nothing is deeper to Kenji's heart (and, henceforth, Bakuryu's) than his beast form. Kenji, try as he might, cannot and will not forget all the lives he's ruined at the ends of the ten sharp points on his hands. His fear of Bakuryu is so strong that those memories, memories that belong to Bakuryu, overtake him every time he even considers changing. Unlike Yugo, who loves his beast nature (his run earlier this night is a weekly -sometimes nightly- thing for him), or Uriko (who shifts every time she becomes angry, frustrated, or otherwise strung out in some way- she has relatively little control over her power) or even Alice (who merely accepts her beast nature and goes along with it), Kenji fears his beast form, and has never shifted once in his "true" form. Every time he has turned into a Zoanthrope, it is Bakuryu, not Kenji, who has initiated it.  
  
As it is now.  
  
" Fine then," Bakuryu says, smiling. " I'll tear him apart for you. But, a deal..."  
  
" A deal?" Kenji says, a rebuttal already on his lips. " What do you mean?"  
  
" Simple," Bakuryu says, smiling. " The first time you and Uriko make love, I get to be part of it. Deal?"  
  
" What?! No!" A wave of negation flows through the land around us.  
  
" C'mon," Bakuryu says. " It's not like I won't be part of it anyway. Your memories are my memories, regardless of what those memories are about." His grin spreads wider.  
  
" No," Kenji says, even more firmly.  
  
" Please," Bakuryu says, and madness and want flows through the land about us. " You never let me live you never let me be! I always want to reach out and touch the world, taste it, smell it, see it.... but you keep me locked up inside. It's been so long since I've touched another human being..."  
  
" You slay all you touch! A monster such as you should never be let loose in the world!"  
  
" Wait! Please!" Bakuryu is pleading now, arms spread out and palms up in supplication, and as he does this we see another side of him- the young child who was broken under Busuzima's control. " It has been so long since I've been able to do anything... I can see out your eyes, but I can't control them. I can feel your legs moving, but I don't know where we're going. Help me! Let me out into the real world. Let me touch Uriko..."  
  
" Never." Kenji's negation is so strong that it blankets this world, momentarily shrouding this land in darkness. " I would die first."  
  
" Then you will!" Bakuryu shouts. " You will die! And Uriko will suffer more than you know! She loves you, for whatever reasons exist in her heart. And your death will cause her more pain than you can imagine!"  
  
" Will it?" Kenji asks, his eyes soft and sad. " Or will it simply free her to find someone else, someone better for her than me?"  
  
" I don't know," Bakuryu says, shaking his head. " But neither do you. Let me out. I won't ask for Uriko," he says hastily, seeing darkness flash over the horizon as Kenji rages at the very idea, " but I will ask for this. Let me out. You can keep some control over me, I guess- I'm not stupid enough to assume you'd just let me have my fun- but let me out in the real world. That's all I ask."  
  
" When?" Kenji says, mulling this idea over. It is something he would actually consider, and in his belief that he can control Bakuryu, it is not something he is too afraid to give. " When do you want to be free?"  
  
" Any time," Bakuryu says truthfully. " You pick the time and place. I will obey your orders and be on my very best behaviour." He says this last with a touch of mockery, believing he is winning the argument and may very well gain what he wishes.  
  
" Very well," Kenji says. " If that is what you ask for, so be it. Now come. We must save Uriko."  
  
The world spins and falls apart....  
  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
Room 350, Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near heart of Tokyo, Japan. 2:48 a.m.  
  
It has been but a few seconds since the strange, hurried conversation in Kenji's mind began, and now that the dealing is done (and this deal may stretch far beyond itself) the work can begin. The light fades in Kenji's eyes, only to be replaced by a far harsher light. Kenji lifts his head, grinning and laughing to beat the devil.  
  
" Ah! Yes!" Bakuryu says, standing up and flexing. " I forgot how a real body feels! Oh this is GREAT!" Bakuryu stretches, and when Kohryu slashes at him, he flips out of the way. " Oh yeah, forgot about you. Kenji told me all he had to- guess I got to kill you now! So...."  
  
Bakuryu grins, and his entire body begins to shake. The light of change comes over him, and right before his voice is taken from him (as a Mole, he cannot talk since his mouth is too deformed), he says, " IT'S SHOWTIME!"  
  
The light leaves, and before us stands Bakuryu in the form his enemies and his victims know best. His shirt is torn and rent; the Mole form is too large for the shirt he was wearing and has split it. Soft brown fur covers the upper torso and what little we can see of the legs. The body is shaped like an upside down bowling pin; it is medium sized at bottom, small in the waist, and huge in the upper body. Two long, strong arms extend from the sides. Each ends in oversized hands with even more oversized claws. The head, which is simply that of a mole with red eyes, should look absurd on that huge torso; but the strange malice and cool evil radiating out from it dispel any notions of hilarity and make it a dark, gruesome thing. This is Bakuryu the Mole. Also sometimes referred to, in both Busuzima's reports and on the street, as the Claw.  
  
A strange, gurgling chuckle emanates from the creature before us. Bakuryu is laughing. This is the sound many of his victims heard right before he killed them. Kohryu, who in his madness knows no fear, merely gazes at Bakuryu curiously, as if he is some new and strange sight that Kohryu is busy computing. Computation (or whatever passes for thought in that strange, muddled mind) complete, Kohryu rushes forward with his claws outstretched. Bakuryu dodges, moving so quickly that it seems he is not even there. Bakuryu catches Kohryu's outstretched claw in his own (delicately palming it, making sure that his knives do not touch his victim) and flings the beast into a nearby wall. Beds crumble and lamps snap as Kohryu flies into them. Bakuryu's strange, bubbling chuckle comes purring out again.  
  
Kohryu barely manages to rise before he is thrown down again, this time by Uriko, who does not know that it is Bakuryu, not Kenji, who is now in the driver's seat of her love and henceforth needs very little help (with the possible exceptions of Long, Gado, and Shina, Bakuryu is the most dangerous of the Zoanthropes in terms of both combat abilities and sheer will to kill). Uriko flings herself on Kohryu and proceeds to scratch his strange, metallic face. She breaks several of her claws in the process, but ignores the pain in her hands. Kohryu shakes and jitters as Uriko assaults her, but then his programming kicks in and he dashes forward. Uriko is slammed straight into a wall, and as Kohryu's unforgiving metallic form shoves her forward, she screams in pain.  
  
Bakuryu, who, despite the fact that he doesn't love Uriko, does feel some emotion for her (lust would probably be a more fitting description, but that's beside the point) and henceforth rushes forward to save her. Having noticed in the ruckus that the human doctors, after getting over their initial fright, had run bug-eyed to the nearest guards shouting "Monster! Monster!" and that said guards were approaching with pistols drawn and nerves snapping, Bakuryu decides to do the polite thing and take the fight outside. Barreling into Kohryu, Bakuryu tackles him and flings him out the same window through which he entered earlier this night. We rush out with them, eager to see the conclusion of this fight, whether both combatants will simply fall to their deaths (or not; knowing Bakuryu's luck, the assassin will merely break a few bones and be forced to hobble off for healing) or whether the fight will continue in mid-air.  
  
The answer turns out to be neither; both Bakuryu and Kohryu have dug their claws into the side of the building and are continuing the fight while hanging from the building. Bakuryu performs an odd half-swing by pushing off with his right arm, digging it in, then pushing off with it again, moving him forward in strange little hopping jerks. Three of these little hops bring him to Kohryu, and he proceeds to use his momentum to give Kohryu a solid kick in the face. Kohryu takes it quite stolidly and proceeds to swing his claw arm. In a completely instinctive reaction, Bakuryu ducks his head and moves his hand to protect his face- which also makes him lose his grip and causes him to fall. Hurriedly grabbing back onto the concrete walls of the hospital, he looks up and sees a sight that momentarily boggles the assassin. After all, even Zoanthropes don't expect to see flying cats drop on their heads.  
  
Uriko had ran to the window upon seeing Bakuryu fall out, the pain in her lower back forgotten in her worry over Bakuryu. She looks down, and seeing what she assumes to be her love still locked in battle with the thing, she does the best thing she can. Uriko is very brave, but more so than that, she feels that Bakuryu is down there because he had been saving her. Of course that's not the full truth, but with both the assumption and the assurance that teenagers always have, Uriko is sure that Kenji had just valiantly risked his life to save hers, and she would be damned before she would forgo payment of such a debt. Ergo, Uriko leaped straight out the window, claws down, caterwauling (if you'll forgive me a little pun) loud enough to wake the dead. Bakuryu is momentarily stunned; Kohryu, whose brain doesn't work all that well in the best of situations, is completely dumbfounded and merely watches as Uriko plummets like a furry comet straight at his head. The impact makes a sickening crunch that causes all of us to wince. Metal or not, that had to hurt. As Uriko slams into Kohryu, the mutant beast loses his grip and falls down. Uriko plummets with him, almost knocked cold by the force of impact, her dazed mind registering nothing as Bakuryu stretches out a single clawed hand and almost gently catches her. Pulling her in close, Bakuryu enjoys the feel of her body and wishes fervently that he had both the time and the ability to enjoy her further himself. Having to content himself with a few choice squeezes (most of which Uriko doesn't register in her daze, and those few she does notice, she assumes to be accidents caused by Kenji trying to avoid slicing her open on his claws). As Bakuryu essentially palms the half-beast, he looks up and sees Yugo performing small jumps from window to window of the hospital. From the window of Room 350, the confused screams and hurried shouts of the guards can be heard. Although Bakuryu does not see it, we watch as Kohryu spins through the air, clutching at the side of the building that is too far away for him to touch. His fall seems to be in slow-motion, and we circle him as we fall. Yet even as we watch him plummet, we watch Yugo reach the hanging Bakuryu. Abandoning the still falling Kohryu, we rush over to hear what he says.  
  
" We have to leave," Yugo says, still dazed and badly hurt by Kohryu's assault. From below there is a noise of metal scraping, than a horrendous crash. Yugo, who is still deaf (though healing; even Zoanthropes on the verge of death have been known to recover fully when given enough time), feels the impact in his bones and looks down. Bakuryu, knowing full well what the sound was, emits his strange little chuckle and looks down.  
  
Below the building, a hunk of wrecked and twisted metal, Kohryu lays dead, twitching and shivering as his unlife leaves him. The metal twists and burns and shakes and jitters and then, as it seems that Kohryu must get up, that he must be badly hurt but not dead, the metal gives one last groan and gives up with a twisted shriek. Kohryu's dead (or it that re-dead?) carcass lays still, bones busted and laying in odd angles, metal jutting out where it refused to break, tearing the skin and bones it had underlaid. The glass that made up Kohryu's face is broken and busted, and a slowly dying whirring noise, like the sound of a long-running machine finally being put to rest, comes from the figure. The whirring finally stops with an audible click, and it is over. Electricity sizzles, sparks, dies. People stand staring around on the street nearby, looking at the corpse, and as their eyes travel upwards someone screams and runs to a nearby telephone. Bakuryu considers killing that person before they can get to the police, but decides it would be too much trouble in a night that will apparently consist of nothing else.  
  
" Head to... park," Yugo says, working through the pain in his head. Bakuryu notices the blood dripping from Yugo's ears and wonders uneasily if Yugo will die. Bakuryu personally has no stake in the matter, but Kenji thinks of Yugo like a surrogate big brother/father, and he's suicidal enough as it is without a family member dying. Thinking rather wryly that Kenji only dragged him out for the hard parts, Bakuryu listens to Yugo explain where they will meet at, in more human form. Yugo takes off, clearing the distance between the side of the hospital and a nearby building in one leap. Landing somewhat uneasily, the wolf staggers a bit and then runs off. Bakuryu switches Uriko to a more comfortable position on his shoulder and begins climbing down the building. As he does so, he hears the sound of sirens in the distance. Cursing, he drops down at a rapid pace, eventually landing on the questionable safety of the sidewalk. Taking the still unconscious Uriko with him, he heads off into a side alley.  
  
We follow him into darkness while, all around us, sirens whoop and scream.  
  
-R & R please! 


	10. Machine and Death

Hey people. The silver hair is here.... I must say, this story is longer than I thought it would be. I only expected it to take ten chapters or so... at the moment, I believe that fifteen will be the final number of chapters. That may change, of course, but hopefully I'll be done with this story soon. I probably won't start on my next BR fanfic until next year- I know I said this winter, but a lot of stuff has come up, and I hope to finish at least one of my other fanfics (probably Harry's Madness) by then. Truth be told, I'm getting bored of writing HM.... you can only rip people apart in so many ways before you get immune to all the blood and gore. That, and the storyline actually goes against what I myself personally believe... evil wins in the end in HM. Truth be told, evil never wins in the end (in stories or real life) so that kinda throws a monkey wrench into the works.  
  
But! That is beside the point at the moment. The point is YOU, my lovely BR fanfic readers! So, here we go....  
  
Reviews....  
  
Soundwood: No! I love long reviews! Argh.! (sniff)

Oh well. I'm eagerly awaiting your letter. And I really did like your character, although her last name struck me as funny (an overweight character whose last name is Tuubifor... perfect!) So that's good.  
  
Tiger5913: You've probably affected me, what with all the AKS reading I've been doing lately... the horniness just flowed over :).  
  
Actually I admire your fanfic- I have something of a mental problem when it comes to sex in my own stories (the voices in my head make jokes along the lines of " Little boy's sex drive is freaking out!") so I rather admire those who can put it in their own stories while keeping a mature outlook on things. Kudos.

Me, when I do have sex in my fics, find that once the voices in my head leave me alone, that it's funnier than hell. Henceforth, Bakuryu's groping tendencies. :)

As for banishing you to hell.... I thought we dealt with that? (And if I could just find my cross.... :)  
  
VGuyver: Yo, fellow FM3 fan! Thanks for the review. And as for ol' Baky- he's both :).  
Okay then, that's settled. Let's go straight to....  
  
"SHOWTIME!"  
  
Chapter 10  
  
Machine and Death  
  
Streets outside Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near heart of Tokyo, Japan. 2:55 p.m., Night of the Mark.  
  
We flit down the alleys like some sort of invisible birds on the wing, silent and more stealthy than even the Ninja before us has ever been. As he changes from beast form to human form, his upper body shrinks and resumes normal proportions with his body. Claws now hands, he gently takes the unconscious Uriko into his arms (not fondling her this time; she's starting to come awake, and much as Bakuryu would love to get his hands on her, now is not the time) and checks out the alley. No one there, but the sirens are getting louder, and the police will arrive soon. If they look in the alley, they will see a human male carrying what looks like a human female (until they get close, at least, and notice the furry paws, not to mention the tail and ears). Every human in the area will be taken in and locked up for blood testing. The tests will reveal who is a Zoanthrope, and then that person will be summarily arrested by the government, taken to labs in the north, and then tested on until they die. Such is the way of life for Zoanthropes in Japan.  
  
Bakuryu looks around for a way out of the alley (preferably on the rooftops) and sees a handy fire escape. Putting Uriko on one shoulder, he leaps up, grabbing onto the small metal fence that surrounds the fire escape. Using his strength to the fullest, he manages to lift his shoulder up and dump Uriko onto the escape. That weight gone (and she and Kenji weigh almost the same amount; neither of them are big people) Kenji flips over with ease. Uriko mutters a groggy question.  
  
" Don't know," Bakuryu says, having no idea what she just said but confident his answer will suffice. It does and Uriko goes back to a semi-doze. Bakuryu hoists her up and walks up the fire escape's stairs. The stairs clang and creak like hell, but that's okay- the sirens are beginning to drown out all sound in the area, even those Bakuryu is making. We float up, needing no cover for our sounds, for we make none at all.  
  
Bakuryu gets to the top and begins calmly walking to the edge of the roof. A helicopter is whirling in, and it's searchlight is scanning the buildings nearby. It's still on the other side of the street, however, and Bakuryu is confident he will be long gone by the time it searches this roof. Everyone's still busy at the hospital, where unbeknownst to Bakuryu, Alice is frantically searching for her sister. The entire fight being short and brutal (as most Zoanthrope battles are) Alice does not know if her friends are alright. No one knows Alice's secret at the hospital, and she will lose more than her job if anyone finds out. As it is, Alice is questioning the survivors, pretending to be asking for the hospital's sake but really wanting to know what happened. As she hears the details of the battle between a werewolf (as someone calls Yugo) and a tengu (a long nosed Japanese goblin that someone else thought Kohyru resembled), she keeps her face clear of any emotion save frightened curiosity. The sick dread in her heart does not appear on her face, a skill she learned over long years of telling parents that their children were dead, over long years of realizing that you can't save everyone, and that more often than not trying will kill you too, if not physically than in your soul. The bystanders later say that a representative of the hospital asked a bunch of questions, but Alice is good at this too, and the really important ones- like where the Zoanthropes were now- are lost in a flood of questions whose sole purpose is distraction. She is quite skilled.  
  
And scared, of course. But that's to be expected; after all, the ones she loves are now being hunted all across Tokyo. And she can do nothing but stand by and watch. She can't leave the hospital; to do so now, when it appears that her loved ones are dead (killed by those horrible Zoanthrope things) and that the hospital she both works at and loves has been damaged will arouse terrible suspicion in the minds and hearts of Japan. Truth be told, Japan is deeply paranoid about Zoanthropes, and anyone even suspected of having Zoanthrope tendencies or ideas is immediately blacklisted- unofficially, of course. The men who make this list and pass it out in small black letters (without realizing, of course, the significance of the color they chose) have already placed Yugo on it, along with Gado and Jenny. Shina, Alice, Long, Kenji, and Uriko have all been declared "suspect" by the makers of this list (a council which contains some very powerful Japanese officials, including a few on the Mishiyama Corp. payroll) and are under watch even as we speak. Already, a big man with dull eyes (but they look sharp, too, like knives that have been dipped in oil) is watching her, wondering what her reactions will be, watching them to see if they will tell him if she had any part in the goings-on of tonight. It is hard, for those who fight for the coming of the dawn. Very hard indeed. One cannot even let tears fall, for fear the world will lap them up like a greedy dog, hungry for more...  
  
Coming back from our philosophical musings, we see that Bakuryu has disappeared from this rooftop. Shaking ourselves and flapping off, we find him again, in an alley nearby, slipping past the police and whistling. Having come to the realization that 1.) there is no such thing as coincidence, and 2.) life is a lot like a Charles Dickens novel, we are completely unsurprised that the tune he is whistling is "One Headlight" by the Wallflowers. That is a marvelous tune, but it's getting rather old. Following the assassin as he packs the still morphed Uriko (her tail tucked firmly in his hand; it kept rubbing against his face, and it was tickling the shit out of his nose) over his shoulder and out of danger.  
  
Of course, he doesn't know that the real danger is near the park, where a powerful machine called the Heaven Breaker by the company that built it (and guess which company it is? Why, the Mishiyama Corp., of course) and the Big Gun by the police who drive it is currently beginning a scan search of the area, where a strange creature was recently reported. But he can find that out when he gets there.  
  
We fly off into the night, looking for friends.  
  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
Park in Tokyo, about five blocks from Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, 3:15 a.m.  
  
We fly through the night sky, easily overleaping the buildings in our way and leaving Bakuryu and Uriko far behind. We wonder uneasily if that's such a good idea, especially considering Bakuryu's behaviour earlier tonight, but there is nothing we can do but watch and record, and our senses tell us that something is happening here, not where Bakuryu is at. Besides, now that the danger is over, Kenji will soon resume control and Uriko will be completely safe. Until he lets Bakuryu out again, anyway.  
  
As we return to the park that we visited earlier tonight, we see Yugo leaning against a building, panting hard, his hearing slowly coming back to him. He is in human guise now, having staggered over building after building until he finally leapt down an alley and was able to resume his human form. The cops blazed past him, not recognizing the beat-up youngster in their haste to get to the hospital and find out what the hell happened. Even if they had realized that he was the blacklisted Yugo, they might not have cared anyway. The police may be the only governmental organization of Japan who do not hate the Zoanthropes with that total, fanatical hatred of the near-insane; in fact, the police are rather calm about the matter. The head commissioner of the police recently released a report stating that "Zoanthropes are human, like everyone else. Treat them no worse than you would any ordinary subject- just be more careful when dealing with them." The police have actually been kind to the Zoanthropes (relatively), and have been honest and true in upholding the justice which they serve. Police are special creatures, in that regard; not makers of the law but its executioners nonetheless, doing their job with as much dignity and honor as they can muster. They serve the community, and get nothing back but disrespect and anger. It is hard, to be an officer. As one officer in Europe put it, heaven is completely beyond the grasp of the imagination- but hell's in easy reach for anyone who has worn a badge.  
  
Maybe that's why the police do not go out of their way to abuse the Zoanthropes. Because they feel a little kinship with them, in this world that has grown cold to both their causes. Maybe. Just maybe.  
  
Whatever the reason, Yugo managed to get from the hospital to the park unmolested. Now that he is here, away from all the noise and bustle of the city, he can take a breather and wait for Kenji and Uriko. His body is healing now, and the terrible wound inflicted on his eardrum by Kohryu is starting to heal itself. What little hearing is coming back to him is in the middle range of hearing- not the low bass grumbles of the earth or the high-pitched soprano screams of whistles, but the trebles and altos in between. As he leans there and pants, he thanks God and all the saints (Alice is Catholic while he's Protestant, but her method of praying has bled over into his thoughts) that he's healing. For a while there, he had been afraid that he would be rendered deaf forever.  
  
It is Yugo's one weak point, because his ears, fine-tuned though they are, are fragile, and it takes very little to bust them. This is not the first time he's been attacked like this; during the first days of the Zoanthropes ("the Awakening", as Stun had termed it), Jenny had pierced his eardrums in the same manner, when all of them had been running from Tylon's lab. He had been packing an unconscious boy on his shoulder (one he knew only as Bakuryu, but would later come to know as Kenji Ohgami) and had just defeated a great lion-like creature (that had been Gado, who had freaked out when the lightning storm destroyed the power of the labs and freed them all) when something flew over his head. Looking up, he'd seen a thing straight out of nightmare flapping past him on leathern wings. He'd let out a gasp that in his wolf form had sounded like a growl, scaring Jenny and causing her to react instantly with a scream of her own. That scream had not deafened Yugo like this one had, but it had hurt him all the same, and any sounds he heard seemed to go through a wall of cotton before reaching his mind. Both times, it had taken him several days to recover. The more delicate and intricate a body part is, the harder it is for a Zoanthrope to heal that part. Gado had once gotten his good eye gouged quite badly in a fight with Busuzima, and it had taken it a month to heal, though in the end it had been as fine as ever (his other eye had been wounded before that, and so would not heal- wounds received prior to becoming a Zoanthrope were considered "natural" by the healing factor of the body and would not be recovered like normal wounds).  
  
As Yugo leans panting against the wall, he hears something that he should not have heard- a grating whining sound, like that of a ball bearing turning in too little oil. The sound is extremely high-pitched, and he should not have been able to hear it for days yet. So why is he hearing it? His healing has not increased, and save for that one whirr, he hears nothing more from that end of the auditory realm. Why?...  
  
As Yugo turns to look towards the source of the noise, his eyes widen and he steps back in surprise and not a little fear. We turn around, wondering what in the world could have shocked him. We've been hearing something for a few minutes now, like a large truck passing by on the nearby road, but we have not been paying attention to it. As Yugo steps farther back into the alley and behind a dumpster, leaning out to watch the thing passing him, we turn and stare full on at the thing rolling up the small road of the park.  
  
It is huge, this thing, easily twelve foot tall, and as it passes us we hear the tree branches groaning and creaking as they snap upon its metal frame. It has four wheels that resemble tractor tires, each in its own suspension carriage to give the crew a smooth ride and guarantee the gun a sure aim even while driving. Coming up from the tank-without-treads undercarriage is a large, disk shaped body that is clearly the "main" thing on this machine; it even has eyes of a sort, two searchlights that pierce the darkness before it. It is dark blue, and blends in eerily well with the surroundings; this is a machine that could, with the engine off and searchlights dim, bleed right out of normal sight. It has two arms of a sort, looking weirdly like the mecha that populate the world of Japanese anime (this is something that has not escaped the notice of the police who drive the thing; they call it, in alternating terms, the "Gundam", the "Macross", or, in a term gaining popularity, the "Big H", although they mostly just call it the Big Gun) but on a pissed-off, personal level. The two arms end in guns, the one on the right a chain gun of some sort, judging by the long bandolier of bullets coming out from it's right side, and the left a weapon of unknown designation, though the fact that it is larger and is aimed at a slight diagonal suggests that it is an artillery piece of some sort. Two long, claw-like things that resemble spider legs are folded up in its front, presumably to flop down and dig into the ground to provide support for this ponderous thing when it fires its big gun. This is the Anti-Personnel/Heavy Weapons Model HB5912, or as the Mishiyama Corp. calls it, the "Heaven Breaker". The weapon even sports this name on the side, along with a diagram of a cloud pierced by a sword from below. And knowing what we know of the Mishiyama Corp., we can take this to be more than just a fancy name an executive thought up; this is foulness and evil.  
  
Of course, we ignore all that at the time. After all, we're staring at a raging, swarming, screaming field of ghosts, a field that surrounds the machine and makes it glow.  
  
That make it glow a very fiery, very dull red, the red of suppressed hellfire.  
  
-R & R please!


	11. Cast Into Darkness

Hey everyone. 's down... but by the time I'm done with this, it should be back up again. Sorry for the delay, but it's been a looong week...

I'm just glad 's taking wordpad documents now...

To the reviews:

V Guyver: Hey man. Good to see you here. Oddly, Tiger hasn't reviewed... and she's been incommunicado on her AKS story recently. Maybe someone kidnapped her for money (looks vacant and thoughtful at the same time)... Hmmm... nah...

(tied up Tiger being carried off is seen in background as Silverlocke continues talking) Anyway, thanks for reviewing. And thanks too for your notes on the prejudice theme of the story... truth be told, prejudice is a big thing to me, simply because it is so illogical and stupid. People hate and hate for no good reason.... There is a difference between hating someone for something they can change (which is perfectably justifiable in some cases), and for something they cannot change (like race). I live in a fiercely racist area, where most people hate and despise blacks. I personally believe that everyone IS created equal, and challenge anyone who differs to give me a good reason why. Blacks, whites, asians, we are all HUMAN, and it is the acts we choose to perform, not the parameters of our body, that determine who we are.

There is a black person I despise at my school, but that's because he's a jackass.... it has nothing to do with his race :).

Thanks for noticing the theme in the story- I tend to have trouble with themes, since they are long, drawn-out things to orchestrate and I tend to be a "scene by scene" type guy...

And as for the Mishiyama Corp., let me say this: There is another corporation at work here, one whose size, power, and might dwarf the Mishiyama Corp. and make it look like an ant next to a whale. And yet, this corporation is very different... you'll see what I mean in the next BR story.

And it's NOT a wanzer.

Kohryu: Thanks for reviewing!

Enough with that already, it's....

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter 11

Cast Into Darkness

Park, about five blocks from Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. 3:17 a.m., Night of the Mark.

Yugo backs up against the dumpster, pressing himself up against it and feeling his heart catch up to his throat. He fairly yelps in fear, reverting to his wolfish ways in human form, pressing up against the wall and the dumpster and tensing so hard that his neck muscles scream in pain. Twin lights flash from the Heaven Breaker, and both circle and circle where Yugo once stood.

From inside comes the sound of a man saying "What was that?"

" Don't know," someone else admits.

" It looked like a man..."

" Probably just a drunk bum. C'mon, let's go. This place gives me the creeps."

" Driving this damn tank gives me the creeps..."

And so off they go, the men inside talking still, while soul after soul spins and screams and whirls about the Heaven Breaker. They especially seem to swirl around the smaller gun, as if this place is special to them, maybe even a part of them. Around the rest of the tank they float and swirl around the outside, sometimes flowing down to it's surface and landing on its surface, flattening as they touch it, transforming themselves into screaming, melted puddles for a few seconds before flowing off like melting plastic peeling from a tube and resuming flight. And yet, on the small gun, they do more than just touch briefly on it, they flow _through_ it, spin all around it and seem to caress it like an old lover before resuming their shrieking flights. While touching it, the screaming spirits calm momentarily, as if touching the gun brings them fond memories. But if that were true, why the look of sadness on their faces?  
What the hell are these things?

Let's go. I don't believe any of us want to stick around here any more than we have to. Yugo is still crouched behind the dumpster, whimpering in fear and some residual pain (his wounds are flaring up, worse than they were a few seconds ago, as if the fight with Kohryu were but a second ago and not several minutes into the past) but the tank and its drivers didn't notice him, and the spirits didn't notice us as far as we know (none of them turned and looked at us, so we must assume that we were invisible to them) so there is nothing more to see here.

We take wing and fly.

Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, in heart of Tokyo, Japan, five blocks from Park. 3:19 a.m.

We come back to the hospital we so recently vacated, and find many bystanders milling about on the street outside, near where the robot Kohryu lies dead. His body still twitches sometimes, and the odd question of whether or not he will suffer rigor mortis flows through our minds, but that is a question for later tonight, if ever. As we gaze up at the great height of this hospital, we see the hole in the wall (small from down here, but quite large up there) where Bakuryu and Kohryu went tumbling out. The window was almost big enough, but not quite- Bakuryu and Kohryu had weakened the supports of the window when they went through, and a few minutes after their fight Yugo had squeezed through, creating even more of a weakening of the support structure. The window finally caved in a couple of minutes ago, causing an exasperated cop squad to merely stare at it as it went tumbling out towards the street below. A few of the chunks had hit Kohryu's dead form... they'd reverberated rather loudly and scared some passerby when they did so.

We briefly consider flying up and looking at the police officers performing the clean-up, but that's a side story and unimportant to our main quest. We head on inside, looking for the emergency rooms.

As we flow between the walls, we rush past windows, doors, and drapes, searching and seeking for the door that leads to the ICU. We find it... but not before an interesting event occurs.

As we rush through the halls towards the Intensive Care Unit, we take a wrong turn and end up in a different corner of the hospital. This in itself is not so strange- after all, if we were all powerful all knowing beings, we wouldn't have been scrambling for cover on the rooftop of the Mishiyama Corp. after being attacked by the Tabula (and, in fact, if were omniscient & omnipotent, we wouldn't have to bother with this journey at all) - but what we find is strange. That man who had been watching Alice is here now, and as he puts his hand on a telephone that seems to disappear in his meaty grasp, we find what it is about this man that is so shocking. Part of it is his eyes- they look like blurry knives, as if daggers had been stuck underneath the surface of a running stream- but it is also the way he acts, moves, looks around, the way he tries to hide himself despite the fact that he is so large that hiding is nearly impossible. And yet he does it anyway. Somehow this man is able to disappear in a room without ever changing so much as a hair on his head. It is a scary ability, and hints at some past connection with either law enforcement- probably work undercover- or more likely, a past as a drug dealer or other criminal whose most valuable talent is always the ability to disappear at will. Even now, hunched up against the phone, he seems to squash himself into the narrow cubicle and place his entire upper body in it even though we know he can't possibly fit. The people walking by him completely ignore his huge frame. Somehow, as we slide up to him, he is managing to make himself look not ridiculuous but rather inconspicious. Even the small twitches in his legs and the movements of his body indicate a man calling home because a tragedy occured at the hospital. He doesn't look like a doctor, nor is he dressed like one (he is wearing a brown overcoat and brown pants, complete with brown shoes and a brown hat) but he is the right size and width to be a rather effective bodyguard, and he could possibly pass as a patient in the minds of the passersby. His face is invisible in the booth, which would surely spark notice in the eyes of the Japanese here- this man is British in his looks, very Anglo-Saxon. We slide over to hear what he is saying.

" I'm still checking the place out... I saw the needles, but didn't find any medicine... The patient's bed looks all strapped in, though."

The man listens some more to a man telling him goodbye (with a thick Russian accent) and then turns around. As he does so, we see part of his overcoat slip, the part that hangs over his left shoulder. He is wearing a tank top underneath it, and as the overcoat slips slightly we can just make out a few letters tattooed on his arm:

BI

As we ponder what "bi" coudl stand for, the man turns and walks off. We follow him a ways, but unfortunately for us this man doesn't mutter as he walks, and as we wish rather ineffectively that the man was a nutcase of some sort who _did_ talk to himself, we pass the ER ward and hear voices inside. Reluctantly leaving the man behind, we slip inside to listen to Alice and Jane talk (in hushed tones, of course; one can never be sure who might be listening). The room is bright white and full of nurses and doctors checking in on the patients. Alice and Jane have pulled off to a private corner to talk. When she left to find out what had happened in Room 350, Alice had told Jane to stay in the ICU until she came back. She'd half expected Jane to follow her, but Shina is an old soldier, and not given to bursts of irrational feeling or sensitivity. She stood where she was, cool and composed, until Alice returned. Shina has never been one to act in any manner other than that of a cold, detached observer.

" I'm not quite for sure," Alice says, " but I think Yugo, Kenji, and Uriko got away. I think they jumped out the window and made it away..."

" Were they okay when they left?" Shina asks. Even now, whispering about the fates of her friends, her voice is dull and emotionless. She absent-mindedly rubs her left chest with her right hand, and though Alice's sharp eyes notice this, she does not really compute it as meaning anything- after all, Shina has a nasty looking set of claw marks on her chest right there. She files the information away, however, in a corner of her mind, an old habit that comes from the long days she spent hunting for everyone who had been in Tylon's laboratories after they had escaped during Japan's Awakening. Alice, much like the rabbit form inside her, notices almost everything that goes on around her, and is an expert at gathering information, as the questions she asked and disguised tonight aptly proved.

Alice says, " I don't know. The bystanders... most of them only saw the last part of the fight. They all saw Kenji in his..." she looks about, then says the hated words, " beast form take Kohryu out the window. Kohryu's dead... his corpse is outside, in the parking lot. He dropped all the way down..."

Shina nods and says, " Anything else?"  
" After Kenji left, Uriko leapt out the window. Yugo followed her a few seconds later... and that's all I know. There's not much blood up there, surprisingly. I don't think anyone was terribly hurt other than Kohyru." She sighs, letting her breath flow out, and all her self-control seems to flow out with it. " Jane," she says, using Shina's common name, " I'm so scared..."

Shina, her face still calm and composed, says, " I'm sure they're fine. Yugo has faced tougher opponents, and Kenji is very powerful... even your sister has some skill. Don't worry. They are fine."

" But what if they're not?" Alice says, shaking her head. " You don't get it. I'm not worried about the battle. I'm worried about what will happen if they're found. What if the police find them? What will they do? Will they kill them on sight? Will they drag them to jail? Oh God, Shina, you just don't understand! They're out there, somewhere, and I can't do anything about it!"

" Then don't worry," Shina says calmly. " If you can do nothing, then you are unable to affect anything, and might as well stay calm."

" How can you say that?" Alice asks, her voice fierce even though she remembers to keep quiet. " How can you be so damn calm?"  
" I've been this way my whole life," Shina says, shrugging. " I see no reason to change now."

" Oh..." Alice bites back her first reaction, which was to say "Damn you!", and instead walks over to where Long and Gado lay. Shina, unperturbed, follows behind.

" Long, Gado," Alice says, "are you two alright?"  
"We're fine," Gado says. "Just a few bumps and bruises."

" Where are the others?" Long asks, concerned. He is in somewhat worse shape than Gado, but he always puts the needs of others before his own. "Are they alright?"

" I don't know," Alice says. "I can't leave the hospital to look for them..."

" I'll go," Shina says. "No one will notice me in the chaos. I'll slip out and hunt for them."

" Where will you start looking? It won't help if you go out and we lose track of you too," Gado says.

" I'll begin by searching the area around the hospital for scent trails," Shina says. "After that, I'll simply follow them. I know Uriko's scent pretty well, so I should be able to follow her."

Gado nods and says, "Be careful."

Shina nods and leaves. We follow after her, quick and silent as the night.

-R & R please!


	12. Beauty In the Park

Hey people! This was supposed to be up a long time ago, but due to a physics essay (3000 words, too- but I got it back, and I got an A! Hellz yeah!) and a trip to New York (and I'm dedicating this particular chapter to them- people in New York are a _lot_ nicer than people down here, in the South, which goes against every single thing I've ever heard about the North) I've been too busy to do much. So, to make up for it, I'm doing this big ol' chapter.

And another note! There are some of you out there (you in particular, Tiger :) who love Final Fantasy 7. For those of you who do, I have a special treat. Starting this Friday, October the Eight, I will be writing a plot and character synopsis of Final Fantasy 7, starting with a synopsis of the themes present within the work. Ladies and Gentleman, I will be posting this synopsis on , at my personal weblog. So, to all of you here, I grant access and the right to review my work! The address is: . Please (please please!) leave a review there. I cannot stress how important it is to me. It will be my first non-fiction piece of published work, and I really want people to review and tell me what they think. A premature (but hopefully not too optimistic) thank-you to everyone who decides to review my analysis.

And now for my lovely reviewers!

Soundwood: Got your e-mail, Soundwood. If you didn't get it, then write me at my LJ account above, and we'll use it to talk. LJ, unlike Hotmail, loves everybody. :) Liked your letter, by the by- well thought out and very intelligent! Ten points already. (laughs)

As for the review itself... glad you like Yugo, he's one of my personal favorites (that, and I love wolves, period) and I'm trying to write him as best I can... spirits of the dead killed by HB? Good guess, Soundwood! You are almost right, but as they say, almost only counts in horseshoes. They are spirits of the dead, but not Zoanthrope spirits. It'll get explained later in the story.

Glad you love the details. I love details myself (big Stephen King fan here) and so try to put them into everything I do. It's also good to know that I've made at least one reader aware of the danger of the Zoanthropes in real life! (glances around crazily) They are with us! They are all with US!!! (men in white coats with hypodermic needles appear, Silver shrieks and runs away)

(In newer, safer, less populated place) Those guys are always following me... I wonder why? (eye twitches)

V Guyver: Thanks for reviewing! There is no logical support for racism, whether religious or scientific, and those that seek one are monsters in the extreme. Though, to be honest, I would rather deal with someone who believes in a (supposed) religious reason for racism than someone with a (supposed) scientific reason. Those who think they have a science behind their slaughter are far more dangerous- look at Stalin. Truth is, logic is one of the most dangerous things in the world- a new book I heard about recently says that some beliefs are so "stupid" people should be killed for believing in them. The author was speaking specifically of Christianity. I'm a devout Christian, and I think other religions are wrong, but I'm not going to go kill people over them. Logic is dangerous when used wrongly.

Enough of that. It's...

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter 12

Beauty in the Park

Outside Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near heart of Tokyo, Japan, 3:30 a.m., Night of the Mark.

Shina begins walking through the corridors of the hospital, heading towards the front door, where she will exit and enter into the madness that is this night. As she walks through the crowds, walking past crying mothers holding their children and weeping (or following alongside bedcarts that are being rolled out, if the child is too sick to move, and weeping; the hospital has decided to move as many patients as possible to other, slightly safer locations, and they have already evacuated all of the third floor), fathers holding their own children or loved ones and crying, and the nurses who are desperately trying to impose some sort of order on it all, Shina does not notice the furtive glance of one man- a man with a long brown rainjacket on. He glances at her and just as rapidly glances away. Something is wrong with this man... desperately wrong. But we don't know what it is. And, alas, we have no time to stick around and read his mind. Shina walks out, and we follow with her, quick and silent as sleeping shades in the night.

Shina walks outside, and a group of extremely harried, extremely tired policeman (several who are eating rice balls sweetened with a variety of sauces that the white grains have been soaked in; it's the Japanese police officers' version of donuts, merely proving once again that the world is far more odd than any story could ever be) look at her before turning their attention back to the crowd. If nothing else, there is one thing all police officers in the world will agree upon: Everyone hates the media. The media are, to both the police officers and every other free-spirited intellectual, the ultimate bane of humanity.

Newspapers have mutated over the years; they were at first almost holy, selling simple articles whose clean, polite wording and script seemed cold and rational but in truth was hot powerful, powerful in its very simplicity; by allowing the facts and just the facts, it allowed others to judge as they saw fit without making or prejudicing that judgement for them. In the modern world, the media has become corrupted beyond belief, caring not at all for truth or facts but only for "their" side of the facts or "their" version of the truth. The media, most of it owned by megacorporations, has become extremely biased and prejudiced against others- it often only shows the bad side of things, and when it does have something nice to say, it's always for only one person or group (and the media picks a darling and sticks with them like nobody's business. No one receives the attention and the "love" of the media like one of their own hand-picked darlings... and these darlings are often the very last people normal souls would ever choose as someone to love. The leader of the New York Mafia was considered a media darling in his day, as was Al Capone.)

A good example would be the U.S. media during the 2004 presidential election- no media other than Fox would ever show anything "bad" about Kerry, yet would go to great lengths to show "atrocities" about Bush. A media should not do that. It should report facts. If Kerry does something bad, say so. If Bush does something good, say so. If the facts are completely opposite, say so. A media should not (and in a perfect world would not) be the judge and arbiter of all things; and yet it acts that way.

Hm. A sad state of the world, when the media acts for a bias. The police officers now arguing with the reporters from a Tokyo newspaper as Shina walks by them are a classic case in point; the media despises police officers, here in Tokyo, especially after the events of the Zoanthrope breakouts, and especially the famed "Shanghai" incident, so called because the Japanese police officer involved in it was a man from an ancient Chinese family (they'd come over several decades ago, before China went Red) whose surname was Shanghai. Officer Shanghai had been walking along his beat one night when he saw a group of teenaged humans attacking a Zoanthrope child in the middle of the night. The child may have been a Zoanthrope (boar Zoanthrope, actually) but it was still a child, and the fear the older children produced outweighed the physical reality that the child was considerably stronger than any of them (or all of them put together, actually). Officer Shanghai pulled out his pistol and ordered the teens to stop. When one complained that it was just a "Beast Freak", Officer Shanghai repeated his command for them to stop, or he would shoot. One of the teens, slightly drunk both on sake and the feelings he was getting from beating on the child, threatened him with a chain. Officer Shanghai proceeded to shoot the offender, a perfect shot in the chest, that sent the other teens running. The shot teen died moments later. The boar Zoanthrope ran off, scared for its life by the gunshot (the child is still alive, hiding in the streets of the city; very street-smart and wily, he's seen Stun several times before on his midnight runs but he has too much cunning to be seen and too little guts to talk to him) and Officer Shanghai, knowing his police career was over, called the incident in on his radio, feeling very grand and great that he had managed to save a life, no matter whose it was. Two squad cars had arrived soon enough, and after that, it had seemed like the whole world was spinning around him. Everything literally just went from that moment on- he had no control over anything at all.

Officer Shanghai was, predictably, hanged by the media, but the fierce defense of his fellow police officers (rallied by one sergeant's cry of "What if it was your call?!?") made a sentencing hard. Finally, it was decided that he was to be demoted but not entirely fired. The result has made the media, most of whom were made out to be a bunch of hysterical bigots by the incident, extremely suspicious and hateful of the police. The police near Shina right now are keeping mostly silent and communicating as much as possible without words. As the old T-shirt maxim says, "Anything you say will be mis-quoted, and then used against you."

Shina walks past them, heading out in the night, pretending to be merely another curious onlooker in a place already full of them. She moves her head from side to side slowly, then slightly faster, whipping the air around her head into a slight vortex. The resulting motion drags more air to the area of the face, and makes sniffing out a scent easier. It also makes telling the exact original direction of the scent harder to point out, but for faint scents or those times when one has no idea where to start, it's the best way to find one quickly.

Shina shakes her head and snorts, her nose filled with the odor of cat, and begins to perform a slower, more methodical search, lifting her nose and sniffing delicately at the higher, lighter air currents. They are harder to sense than the lower, more brisk air currents, but the scents they carry are far easier to track than those carried by their lighter, more fickle brethren. Long, when training Uriko in the art of Kenpo (as well as teaching her about her Zoanthrope form) spoke often of the proper way to sniff: searching the lower currents will get one confused very easily, as they shift and swirl constantly, and sometimes create new scents by the very mixture of old ones carried on them (Long had once thought he'd been tracking a boar, only to find some very old, very dry sheets of leather lying on the ground, whose scents the breeze had picked up and carried, turning them into the stale, dry shit smell of a boar), while the upper currents, harder to detect though they were, were infinitely calmer, and allowed for much easier access to the object emitting the smells on it- and as far as either Long or anyone else knew, the upper currents never led anyone wrong. Shina stands and sniffs, nose testing the air as our mouths would test water, to see if it was good or bad, and while she draws her fair share of odd looks from a few select members of the crowd (two of them a pair of adolescent boys, separated by about twenty feet in distance and zero feet in brainpower, who thought she was the hottest person they'd ever met until she did that weird sniffling thing- it was a hospital, after all, and so both boys think she's got some weird sort of disease and that she's about to freak out on all of them), she ignores them all. She finds what she is looking for, and then begins walking towards the source of the smell, nose twitching only slightly now, as she hunts and hunts for Uriko and Kenji.

We follow behind her, but soon outstrip her and head for the two of them on a direct path, one which has us flying over buildings until we reach the outskirts of the park, where Bakuryu is currently giving up control to Kenji and where Yugo has managed to finally stagger in, dropping down on a drunk's bench and puking his guts out, sick to his stomach from the encounter with the Heaven Breaker.

We fly.

-

Park, about five blocks from Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. 3:40 a.m.

We find our targets and swoop down on them, circling and circling like great birds of prey, and as we do so we survey the surrounding area. Below us (and behind the young couple on the bench) a small road sits, its paved surface merely another black gleam in the night. A few streetlights adorn it, active for the few cars or people active at this hour. F. Scott Fitzgerald once described this time as the "dark night of the soul", and though we tend to be less pessimistic and "down" then the great literary master is, we must admit that it is right now, with neither sun nor moon in the sky, that the night seems darkest. The trees here look like ebony towers of spears in the darkness, and the stars above are not warm and bright as they are when the moon is first ascending to its throne in the sky; they are cold, distant, bright, like ice points hung in some velvety blanket. The grass is invisible, and only the soft sigh of wind brings noise to this place. A jogger, some half a mile away, runs by, performing what may be the earliest early morning run in the history of the world. Other than him, no one else is about right now save us and our young charges. As we float down, the detail of the world flows to us, and we observe our favorite Zoanthropes' current positions in the park.

Bakuryu sits down on the bench beside the slowly-coming-awake Uriko, settling himself in comfortably, just enjoying the feel of the night breeze's as they play across his skin. He's going to have to give this up, soon- even now, he can feel his other, Kenji, getting restless, abiding by his agreement and waiting until Bakuryu thinks Uriko is safe before he comes out, but wanting more and more to get out and make sure she _is_ okay, because Kenji trusts Bakuryu about as far as he can throw him. Considering Kenji cannot even physically throw Bakuryu in the first place, this is a very small amount of trust indeed.

Bakuryu chuckles as he muses over these thoughts, and glances at Uriko as she begins to wake up. Her lithe, cat-like body (_very_ cat-like, now; she even has ears and a tail, which for some reason has always tickled Bakuryu to death, in that black place he calls a heart) shivers and shudders, and she shakes her head in a quick back and forth motion, clearing it for a moment as she rises up. She puts a paw to her forehead and moans.

" Ow," she whines, "my head." Rubbing the spot above her eyes where her skull was forcibly introduced to the Zoanthrope Kohryu, she makes a small pouting face which Bakuryu, seated behind her on the bench, cannot see. He can, however, see her behind, and grins as he watches her shake her body, which causes the most intriguing motions of her ass and posterior parts. "I feel like I was just in a car wreck..." She continues rubbing her head, and almost absent-mindedly scratches her foot with her tail (something she does often when in beast form; her tail is extremely prehensile, especially compared to those of other Zoanthropes, and she uses it for everything from holding small objects to scratching that itch one can never quite reach on the back). Startled into shock by the realization that she even _has_ a tail, Uriko jumps up and turns around. Behind her, smiling cooly, sits Bakuryu.

"Kenji?" she mutters apprehensively, and in an act of grace and courteousness which shocks Kenji, Bakuryu abruptly vacates the driver's seat. Bowing to Kenji in his head, Bakuryu says, "She's all yours."

Not really knowing quite what to say, Kenji plops himself into the driver's seat and takes control.

"Hey, Uriko," Kenji says, and his former grin of cool becomes replaced by a slightly shy, much more innocent smile. "You... passed out. Ba... I dragged you here. It's a park. A safe place." Shrugging a little self-consciously (Kenji is getting very uncomfortable, being here, alone, in the middle of the night, with his sometimes on sometimes off girlfriend, even though, with a head wound on her part and the cops chasing after them on his part, there is as little romance in this scene as in a viewing of a public restroom) Kenji says, "We're waiting for Yugo."

Uriko nods, then rubs her head. " Did he... hurt you?" she asks, saying it slowly not due to shyness (she doesn't even know the word, figuratively speaking) but because the large, angry knot on her forehead is proclaiming its existence in loud words that seem to beat against her forehead in rhythm with her heart.

"No," Kenji says. "You're worse off than I am."

She smiles. "Maybe so." Rubbing her cheek with her paw (one of the feline traits she acquired when she turned into a beast) she mutters a shocked "Oh!" and begins morphing back. Sometimes she cannot change; but this time, everything works out okay, and she shifts back slowly, hair rescinding back into her body, ears slowly losing their great peak and becoming normal human ears, tail swallowing back into her body until it is finally gone. When she is done, she looks down at herself- and moans again.

"My dress is ruined," she whines, and we look down and see it is so. Getting into a fight is hard on a kimono; turning into a Zoanthrope and then getting into a fight is even worse. Uriko's dress is torn in many places, and she no longer has shoes, her bulging claws rending the house slippers she was wearing when she changed. "Oh well," she says, immediately changing tact, "at least we're okay." As we circle around the pair, listening to them, she winces and puts her hand against her forehead. "Oof," she says, gingerly rubbing it. "Kenji..."

Kenji looks at her. "Yes?" He's concerned for her- rather sweet, actually, considering he'd just placed her life in the hands of an insane killer less than thirty or so minutes ago.

Then again, one has to make do with what one has, so by that standard, he's done fairly well by her... By all of us, maybe.

"I'm fine," Uriko says, and smiles at him. Her face suddenly saddens, and the smile turns bittersweet. Turning her head slightly to the side, she says, " Kenji?"

He looks at her. "Yes?"

"What I said in the hospital... about you not being a monster..."

Kenji looks away and suddenly seems to close up, the defense he has against all the world, his face growing cool and impassive all at once. Of course, if he'd just think about it for a minute, he'd realize Uriko has nothing mean or hurtful she could possibly say to him- he had just saved her life, after all, in the fight against Kohryu (of course, that had been Bakuryu, but the again, it's all one and the same, isn't it? Kenji and Bakuryu. Two souls... or just two sides...?) and it would be the rare and spiteful person indeed who would find anything at all wrong with their rescuer after such a situation- but Kenji is not a man who ever thinks of the bright side of things. He has been hurt and broken, ill used, all his life, and so he has never really learned to trust anybody. He has already told Uriko far more this night than he has ever revealed to anybody (with the exception of Yugo) in the entirety of his life, and though he trembled on the edge of telling everything to everybody (both Yugo and Alice, Uriko, all of them) in the hospital room, Kohryu interrupted that sentence before it ever began, and now Kenji is sure he will never tell them. Never.

He can't. Or maybe he simply won't.

As Uriko sits with him, Kenji closes up, and waits for the hammer to fall.

"It's true. You're not a monster." Uriko leans over and hugs him tight, surprising him out of his calmness, and a deep, almost existential sadness- maybe the only real emotion in Kenji's mind at all times- takes him over. He leans over her and hugs her back.

"Thank you," he whispers. " Thank you."

Uriko nuzzles him, and says, " Kenji... what you've done... you saved me! That's a good thing, Kenji, a heroic thing. You're not a monster." Uriko lays her head against him again, and says, "So just let it go, okay? Just for a little bit."

And as Kenji slips off into sleep, Uriko trailing after him (it's been one _hell_ of a long night for these two), he hears her whisper these words to him, as she falls asleep on his chest...

"Just for a little bit, okay?... No bad dreams, just sleep..."

And so they sleep.

We fly.

- R & R please! I know the style seems a bit odd, but I am returning from a _long _absence, so give me a bit of time, folks. And for a friend of mine who will remain unnamed (begins whistling "Eye of the Tiger") the last scene is dedicated to you. May you live strong, live long...

And vote for George W. Bush. :P


	13. Battles Begun, Battles Ended

Hey everybody. I'm back! So...

One thing. As a Republican (and, henceforth, as a miniority on the Internet) I have only this to say:

YES! Go Bush!

(coughs) Ahem. Now, let's get on with it, shall we?

It's...

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter 13

Battles Begun, Battles Ended

Park, about five blocks from Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, in Tokyo, Japan, Night of the Mark. 3:50 a.m.

We lift off and leave the two young loves sleeping peacefully next to each other, flapping our wings to reach up into the night air and find another not very far from here. And not very far is exactly where we go; we fly for only a few minutes before we cross over Yugo's head, finding him lying next to a bench and puking his guts out into a nearby trash can. We fly down, the chill night breeze flying unfelt through our feathered and leathered wings, and as we land on the ground, we see his body shake with weakness.

Yugo coughs a little bit more, a dry, racking sound, like some harsh motor that doesn't want to work in the cold of morning, then shudders and shakes some more before finally settling down. He takes a deep, shaky breath, then another, and another, finally calming down to the point where he can breathe normally again. Yugo closes his eyes and moves his head away from the trash can (he doesn't want to look at his own vomit; he's afraid it might make him start puking again), scooting back on the bench and finally taking up a small section of it, huddling up with his knees to his chest, shaking and feeling as if he's ready to cry, as if he's hurt so bad that nothing but tears could help it. But he doesn't cry; he feels like he can't at the same time he feels like he must. It's confusing to him, and very messed up, but it is the best he can make sense of the way he feels.

Yugo does not know it, but he's not the only person to have felt this way after a dealing with the Heaven Breaker. After agreeing to buy it, the chief of police for Tokyo (a good man, if a little dull, which to many city managers is the perfect type of person to become police chief; good enough to catch the crooks in the streets, not smart enough to catch the manager's work in exploiting the city funds) walked out of the room where the deal had been made (wondering why the executive from the Mishiyama Corp. had seemed so _slimy_ to him) and suddenly, inexplicably, found himself sick. He had been found later, passed out in one of the bathrooms nearby, vomit everywhere on the floor. The police had hushed it up, believing it to be a case of stomach virus (which had went around the police department that week- the week they had bought the Heaven Breaker, which should have probably warned some of them of _something_, especially since the executive from the Mishiyama Corp. had made their cop-sense tingle all day with the word "Criminal" flashing in their minds whenever they saw him) and so the news never got a hold of it. The police chief never connected his bad feelings with the Heaven Breaker, though he has sent several notices to the Mishiyama Corp. telling them that the Heaven Breaker causes "inexplicable feelings of motion sickness" in those that drive it, or at least, " a very disoriented feeling", which the Mishiyama Corp. constantly chalks up to "balance problems" and the fact that "the police are new to using it and will quickly become accustomed to it, eliminating your problems with sickness and fear." It should be noted that nowhere in his letters did the police chief ever mention anything about fear, but unfortunately, he never picked this up when reading the return letters they sent him. If he had, things might have gotten very interesting for the Mishiyama Corp. for a while.

Yugo eventually settles down, and the half-cried unshed tears in his eyes finally sink back into his eyelids, awaiting another day to weep. Yugo gets up, and, shaking his head, catches a wiff of something. Quickly raising his head and taking a sniff, he identifies the smell- it's Kenji and Uriko. He breathes a sigh of relief and turns to follow the scent, walking quickly to find his younger brother and his girlfriend, glad that, even if they are not okay, he is nearby and able to help them if they need it.

Already walking along quickly, he hastens his steps. Soon he is comfortably jogging, edging towards a run.

We take wing and fly.

-

Abandoned Warehouse in Tokyo, Japan. 4:10 a.m.

Stun watches as Jenny falls into fitful sleep, still in her Zoanthrope form (contrary to every single thing Stun has ever read or watched on TV about werewolves and other were-beasts, Zoanthropes do not change form when they fall asleep, get knocked out, or anything else; the change is conscious for everyone he's ever met, with the exception of Uriko, who's transformation isn't very stable at the best of times and is not always completely under her control), then turns his mind towards what had hurt her. Stun's mind is extremely strong and very capable, and he is the one person whom Busuzima respects out of the ones arrayed against him. Busuzima thinks Long is too honorable to kill him (the one outcome Busuzima has ever feared; he believes that, so long as one has life, one has power, one has options, and one has escape), believes Uriko to be hilariously funny (she once attempted to attack him and accidentally tripped while rushing towards him; Busuzima has never forgotten it and has repeatedly heckled her as "Stumbles" whenever they enter battle), and generally treats the others with disregard and contempt. But Stun (or Stephen, his real name and what Busuzima calls him) is the one person whom Busuzima respects; he is the one person whom Busuzima enjoys fighting. Fighting for fighting's sake is fun, even for Busuzima, but fighting with an opponent just as crafty, just as smart, and most especially, just as good at mind games is fighting on the purest level for him. Busuzima finds Stun a worthy opponent.

Which is one reason why he turned him into a Zoanthrope on a black, stormy, terrible night long ago, when the lightning was so bad it seemed as if the sky was shrieking every time the lightning razed down the side of the sky and tore open great, rain-bleeding jags out of it. Busuzima changed him, not out of malice, but out of respect; Busuzima had just recently turned himself into a Zoanthrope, and had decided that, if Stephen was his greatest nemesis (and he was; Stephen was usually only one step behind Busuzima in the scientific realm, but unlike the mad doctor, he had a sense of compassion and heart that would not allow him to participate in Busuzima's crimes, making him a powerful voice against Busuzima's evil in the offices and apartments of Tylon), then it was only fitting that they be equals in that area as well. At the time, Busuzima was the only living Reptile Zoanthrope in the world, and so he thought it just that his greatest opponent also be the only living specimen of his kind. Busuzima now has many brethren in the world, most based off his research, but Stun is still the only Insect Zoanthrope in all the world.

Stun's mind turns towards the events of the day, constantly replaying them in his mind. He even searches his own actions for possible clues (not that he is afraid he did something on purpose- far from it- but he does realize that perhaps his actions had caused Jenny to be hurt so badly that the normally tough and strong Bat Zoanthrope would be so tired and so seemingly timid), but he eventually shakes his head in vain and gives up. He cannot just think his way out of this mess. Getting up and stretching slightly, he gently taps his friend on the shoulder.

" Hey," he says, gently, quietly, trying to avoid alerting the bums nearby to his presence, " Jenny."

She moves slightly in her sleep and says, eyes closed, " Where am I?"

" The warehouse. I haven't moved you." Jenny knows that there was always the chance Stun would move her while she slept; all of the Zoanthropes have awoken in a place different from the one they slept in at one time or another, due to various reasons.

" Oh." Gently, she cracks open one eye, and says, " Is it morning?"

" No," he says. " But close to it. You need to go home. And I want to check on Alice...."

Jenny waits to see if her heart will pound in her chest like it did when she first heard him mention going to Alice's, but she doesn't feel anything and attributes her former feelings to mere nerves and the shock of being hurt like she was. " Alright," she says, nodding to him. " Let's go home, then." She prepares to stand up, and when Stun reaches out to gently grab her wing/arm (one of the funnier conversations she and Stun have had- one that comes back to her now, as he helps her up- was about the proper definition of her hands in bat form- were they wings? Arms? Leather jackets that haven't been processed yet? Stun has a wry, somewhat dry sense of humor, and in a world where so many people hated Zoanthropes and wished them dead, anyone with a sense of humor on the side of right was a good thing), she gratefully accepts his hand and stands up. Moving slightly, shaking her body to make sure no vestiges of pain still remain in it, she shivers and stands up fully.

" Hey," she says. "What are you going to do?."

He shrugs. " I'm going to head to Alice's, see what I can find there. Then I'll probably go over to Yugo's house, check on everybody I can there..."

She nods to him, and says, " All right. I'll spend the rest of the night in bed... I don't hurt anymore, but I think it best not to move, don't you?"

" Yes," he says. " Now... I'll see you home first."

She smiles rather wryly, and says, " Oh, how gentlemanly of you. And after so fine a date, too...."

He snorts and turns, looking for the window he came in through. Finding it, he leaps to the top of it, easily making the eighteen foot jump. Jenny, too, leaps, though she flaps her wings once or twice as well, to clear the extra distance her jumps lack when compared to Stun's (Jenny's legs are strong, but paradoxically, the same lightness that allows her to fly is the same lightness that makes her too light to jump properly; she is not heavy enough to gain the momentum to propel herself through the air like Stun does, and so must flap to get anywhere she wishes to go). Stun awaits her, and then, heading out over the rooftops, he and she run, Jenny eventually taking to the air (but not flying too high; if she is suddenly hurt again, she wants to be able to crash land with relative safety) and Stun running along below her, finally coming to her high-rise apartment on the outskirts of one of Tokyo's fashionable districts. As she prepares to land in her open window (she has a massive window, one of her main requirements for any place she lives nowadays; if it doesn't have a nice window, how can she get out and enjoy flying?), she stops and lets out a call to Stun, in a pitch far too high for humans to hear but nicely suited to his ears.

" Stun," she says, her voice sounding tinny but otherwise perfectly audible (to us, even the tinny noise is negligible; our ears are far superior even to Stun's), " I don't know what happened to me, but I want you to be careful tonight. I don't feel the way I did a little while ago about Alice's house, but I still don't think that anything good happened there tonight." She shivers as she remembers the feeling she had had, of danger and madness in Alice's house, then says, " Be safe, my friend."

He nods and says, " You too, Jenny." The words are barely whispered into the air, but they are loud enough for Jenny to hear, and she nods to him before flapping quickly into the open window of her apartment. We follow her as well, entering a place that, even in the darkness, is sumptious in the extreme. As she lands inside, she changes back into human form (the bright lights and flames of change which Busuzima thought were the result of "rapid changes in body function" that "charged the nearby atmosphere with bright but harmless phosphorence due to electricity" flaring up around her and then dying as she finishes the change), then stands up and puts on a small silk nightie she hung on the side of the bed earlier this night before going out to fly. She looks out the window, and below her, a lone figure in the darkness, stands Stun, looking up at her with his inhuman and yet friendly yellow eyes. She nods to her friend, and he nods back (she can't see this light, subtle gesture in the dark; her eyes, even in Zoanthrope form, are like a human's, and she is mostly nightblind), before turning to run off into the darkness. We watch all this with our ever-gazing eyes before slipping out the window like running water over oil, down the walls, rushing off into the night to find someone else to play with, a someone who has finally found Yugo's trail and is linking it back with Kenji's, and is just now finding Yugo as he leans against a tree in his favorite park in Tokyo.

We fly.

-

Park in Tokyo, Japan. 4:15 a.m.

Yugo leans against the tree and rests his head back, tired to the bone from this long, horrible night. He breathes in deeply, and as we fly up to him, to study this man up close, we see that he is badly, badly sick, sick to his stomach from many things: his worry over Kenji, his fight with Kohryu, his encounter with the Heaven Breaker. He is not sick in the normal sense of the word, not sick in the bodily, physical sense of hte word, but he is sick in the mind, sick of this day and everything it had brought. He is tired, now, and just wants to rest. He leans against the tree more heavily, and sighs again.

" Are you okay, Yugo?"

We turn as a calm, concise voice speaks to Yugo, but he does not. His ears are still too badly wounded from his previous battle to be of much use to him, and he still cannot hear anything save the lowest and most base of sounds, which are transported through his bones to his ears in the first place and are more felt than heard anyway.

The speaker is Shina, as calm and cold now as she was twenty minutes ago, when we left her outside Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, having just found the scents that Uriko and Kenji left when they departed (or, more accurately, Bakuryu, Kenji, and Uriko left when they departed; with Kenji, two is always a crowd) and departing after them in the same calm, cool manner in which she now approaches Yugo. Seeing the small line of blood that leads away from Yugo's ears and is even now flowing slowly down his face like some sort of watery line or crack in the side of his neck, Shina believes that he must be deaf or close to it. She doesn't know the reason, but she has never really cared much for reasons, anyway; she is much more focused on effects. She is the kind of person who does not care whether a hammer or a crowbar is used to pry a nail up; all she cares about is that the nail is pried up. That is usually a good thing, because you never know when you may have to jerry-rig something up, and someone who is focused on "right tool for the right job" is usually the last person you want to have try to innovate their way out of anything so challenging as a cardboard box; but it is sometimes a wrong thing, too, because someone who cares only about effects may fail to see that the reason is sometimes far more important than what happens afterward. In most cases, true, the effects are all that matter (for instance, the young man who shot the Austrian duke and henceforth started World War I had reasons, but they are unimportant; the bullet he fired is the only thing that anyone has ever remembered about him), but sometimes it is the reasons that matter more than the effects. In World War II, the German Nazis researched many diseases upon the Jews in the internment camps, mostly to fulfill their own sadistic glee, but also for a twisted sort of research. That the effects of this research were actually quite useful to many pharmaceutical groups around the world (those that could stomach the way these insights were gleaned, anyway) is beyond question, but the reason such effects were found in the first place makes the results so horrible that many would rather wait and develop these results after years of research rather than spend one hour touching the records some hideous hand recorded long ago, in an internment camp right next door to Hell and worse in every way possible. Hell, despite everything that has been said about it, isn't so bad when you think about it- only the deserving bastards who've earned it ever go down there, and so the place is, in the end, just. But the internment camps had no justice in them, no justice at all, and in the end, the things done in there are too horrible for words to ever describe.

Shina walks up to Yugo and, completely uncaring of the shock she's about to give him, gives him a gentle push on the shoulder. Snapping awake, Yugo jerks up, then sees it's Shina and relaxes. He mouths something, not really knowing how loud he's saying anything and so speaking so softy that even we strain to hear him. " Shina! You scared me."

She merely looks at him, not moving or acknowledging him in any way. Realizing she didn't hear him, he repeats, louder, " Shina. You scared me."

She merely blinks and says, " Where's Kenji and Uriko?"  
Yugo taps his ears and says, " Sorry, Shina. I'm deaf- Kohryu busted my eardrums."

Shina nods and then thinks for a minute. Finally she hunkers down on her knees and begins making small symbols in the dirt. She makes the Japanese sentence for " Where's Uriko and Kenji?" with her finger, then stands up.

Yugo shakes his head. " Over there, somewhere," he says, pointing vaguely in the direction of the scent he has been following for some time now. " I think they're okay. I don't smell blood, anyway."

Shina nods up at him from her position on the ground and then looks down again. On the dirt, she erases her previous letters and writes " Head home. I'm sending them to your house."

Yugo nods and begins walking slowly out of the park, relying on his familiarity with the place to get him away from here without getting lost in Tokyo's almost subterranean streets. Shina heads off in the direction of Uriko and Kenji's scent trail, with nary a look back. She will find the two sleeping, tap them lightly, and ignore their slight, adolescent embarassment at being caught napping with each other in favor of giving them direct orders to head to Yugo's house. Both will comply, and spend the rest of the night safely there.

Now our attention wavers, and our journey goes towards a different place... Alice's, where Stun will catch a sudden glimpse of something that will make him head towards the center of town, where something horrible is being summoned on a dark rooftop far away in the rain-soaked night...

We fly.


	14. Fearful Dreams

Wow. Two updates in almost as many days. I'm getting all hot and bothered here... (pulls at neck collar) No, really, I am. It's bloody hot where I'm at right now, mostly because my parents believe that the heat in a house should never fall below ninety degrees, assuming, of course, it drops below ninety-five in the first place. (Sweatdrop)

Me, now, I like the cold! Put the thermostat on sixty and I'm pretty much set on dancing! Whoo hoo!

Ah well. You guys aren't here to hear me gripe. So, I'll strip down to my underwear (just kidding! Just kidding! Sheesh...) and then proceed to declare it...

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter Fourteen

Fearful Dreams

Streets, leading away from Jenny's apartment building, Tokyo, Japan, a.m., Night of the Mark. 4:20 a.m.

We flap our wings as we sail through the night sky of Tokyo, enjoying the feel of the night breeze on our wings (well, not really; we kind of _can't_ feel anything, since, technically speaking, we don't even exist here, in this world) and generally just loafing along as we wait for the next great event of this night to take place. This night has been filled with action ever since its start; even now, as the moon finally begins to go down beneath the hills and the world enters a period of darkness where neither sun nor moon brighten the sky, where only cold, faint points of light we call stars burn in the heavens, even in this twilight darkness, it isn't over yet. As the heroes if this world either go home, their parts in this fight finished (Yugo, stumbling in through his doorway and, averting his eyes from the bloodstain on the floor where Kenji tried to take his own life, going off to find paper towels to clean up the long-dried blood, is one of these), or charge on, their parts just begun (Stun, staring up into a blasted sky where rain, white, swollen rain, like flesh-fed maggots, waits to drop with almost sickening plops onto the concrete surface of Tokyo, where the rain that once blasted outside the Mansion de Leo has dried up and now awaits, flickering, fitfully spinning in the cover of clouds it has made for itself, for the time when it will smash down and blast apart everything it touches, from concrete to flesh, from leaves to skulls, is one of these heroes), we fly over it all and wonder how it will all turn out.

There is a chance, of course, that it will turn out all right; those who believe otherwise are more than fools, they are worse than fools, because they drag others down with them in a course that can only lead to self-hate and discrimination against those who believe otherwise. There is also a chance, of course, that everything will go wrong; but those who honestly believe that it will all go wrong are even more foolish than those who believe that, even if some of it turns out okay, most of it will be bad; those who think it will all go wrong have missed the many times in history that things have not only not gone all wrong, but have turned out all right. The Nazis, for example, were monsters; but they were stopped, in the end, as all evil is. Evil cannot stand by itself; despite everything the popular culture of Japan apparently believes (juding by both its movies and its lore), Good and Evil do not need each other to counterbalance themselves. Good is perfectly capable of standing on its own; it needs nothing to make it more stable, nor does it require any sort of "helping hand" or "culling force" (as Evil has been called, from time to time, by men and women who should have known better and yet for some reason don't) to make it more stable. Evil is dumb and dull; unlike Good, which has both Creation and Destruction inside of itself and is, henceforth, perfectly disposed to take care of its own business, Evil cannot Create, and so must Destroy. Destruction is not a bad thing, not always; but Destruction without Creation is merely Decay, and that is, in the end, what Evil is. Evil cannot stand alone; it must have something to destroy for it to exist, and without a Good to smash against and tear down, Evil eventually turns on itself and self-destructs. Good has, and always will be, stronger than Evil for possessing the power of Creation. And so, in the end, I think that things will turn out all right.

Still... I could be wrong, couldn't I?

Yes indeed, I could be wrong.

But let's fly out into this night and see, shall we? Because no matter what happens here, rather I am right and everything turns out okay in the end or rather I am wrong and everything falls down and shatters, we are here to record it, and that is what we shall do. Watch, record, know, see; that is our duty, and we shall discharge such duty with all the honor we can muster and whatever courage we may find. We were not sent here just because we care about what happens on this world (though we all do, each in their own way; for my part, I want to know what happens to Yugo and Stun more than anyone else here); we were sent because each of us have the power, have the _ability_, to see what is happening in this world, with the minimal amount of fuss over who is who and what is what. All of us know a little about this world, knew a little before we ever came here, and so we are perfectly suited to view it, because the time we need to adjust to this world (time we really don't have; this one night has brought with it more changes to more people than perhaps any other night in history, with a few exceptions) is small, just as the time available to adjust to this world is small. Now that we are (mostly) adjusted here, it is our solemn duty to watch and see what it happening. It is not asked that we understand, though with watching may come experience, and of experience all things are born; but understanding is not required of us. Not now, or ever.

We fly.

-

Rooftops of Tokyo, a.m.

We flap our wings and with one step, are above the cloud cover; in the next, working off the force of our will (gravity only affects us when we want it too; it's kind of a convenient way to remember where the ground is, vital when flying so you don't lose your sense of balance) we fly down below it and approach the rooftops of Tokyo in a banked glide. As we fly down, not flapping our wings and merely watching as the ground passses us by, we see the one we are looking for, running along the rooftops (as he has so many times in the past and so many times this night) and heading towards Yugo's house. It is Stun, and as this hero runs through the night, he ponders over the events of the day. Having no knowledge of the occurrences elsewhere in this world, where Kenji tried to take his own life, where Uranus attempted to electrocute the household of Alan Gado and left a great hole in his roof through which rain will soon pour, puddling up on the marble floor after hard, vicious strikes against it, Stun merely finds the events of the night odd. The first event, his battle with the thugs (_battles_, we should say; the fight we watched was merely the first he had this night, and though all of them would have been fun in the extreme to have watched, we are not here for our own enjoyment), is merely an everyday happening to him and is dismissed quickly from thought. Another is, in his mind, simply a random occurence (it should be noted here that nothing _is_ random; everything really does have a purpose in the end, though those purposes are usually vague and at best are not usually very clear), and so he dismisses Shenlong from his thoughts as well, other than a quick pause to wonder how the Zoanthrope clone is doing. The third event, the one that has catapulted him through the night air to reach his friend Yugo's house, is the one that he does not dismiss from his mind, because to him it is the only really important occurrence this night.

It would probably be funny to tell Stun that, of the three events this night, it is actually the _least _important in the long run; in the end, every Zoanthrope has suffered tonight, except Stun, and so the thing that happened to Jenny is merely another normal happening in this long strange night. Of the events, the most important may well be the fight with the thugs, his first fight, the one we witnessed; not important in what happened during it, but in what happened after it. The woman who spoke to Stun, who said "Thank you" and with those two simple words may have sparked a change in Stun more important and more deep than any that his friends could have started (because you expect your friends to love you, you expect your friends to tell you it's okay, and it's alright... but from strangers you expect nothing but truth) may well be the most important person of the many present tonight, because most of what is happening can be linked directly back to what happened (and is happening) on the rooftop of the Mishiyama Corp. and is henceforth merely of a "what happened after" nature in itself (Kenji's suicide being one of these), but the words she spoke to Stun were words spoken of free will, standing on their own, and of such things everything else is born. Stun heard those words and it has sparked a change in him, a change he does not, in a way, really know or understand but, like Shakespeare's famous Scottish general and would-be king, Macbeth, he realizes is happening; even now, when all the words have done is light a small spark in his heart, a little tiny light in the blackness, he realizes that something is happening to him. Macbeth endlessly soliloquized on how he was losing his soul and his mind; in the end, he did nothing to stop the destruction of either. Stun has been silent, so far, and probably will remain so- he's not one to ramble on about his own problems, said problems being immediately obvious when one merely looks at him- but unlike Macbeth, he is doing something about the changes in himself. He is politely ignoring it. Stun is, in a way, almost scared to think of what that woman said, even though it is in the back of his mind even now; he is afraid that, like a match that has had too much oxygen fed to it, it will go out, lose some of its potency, if he thinks of it now. So he leaves it alone. And that happy feeling, not exactly cheeriness and not exactly calmness, stays in the back of his mind, like a light held in the hands of a happy child.

Of course, that feeling is about as far back in his mind as possible. The words have lit a fire inside him; but it is a small fire, and the darkness both inside and outside of Stun is deep, and will take more than a little light to pierce. At the moment, concern for Jenny and thoughts about her condition fill his mind. The small brightness takes a back seat and merely watches the proceeding events with great interest.

As we follow with Stun, not really paying attention to the real world as we delve through Stun's thoughts and our own with all the pleasure that comes from highly intellectual games, we notice that something is happening. The world's getting a little darker... the light's not as bright as it once was... Stun notices this, too, and as we chase after him, he begins to slow down, to look around himself...

The explosion that shatters the building we are on shakes us from our reverie. Stun makes no noise as he falls, as glass shatters all around him, as a blast of incredible power shakes the city, as windows bust out and building tops crack and Stun falls through them, to fall far, far below, into the ick and blackness of the darkness so very far below. Our vision goes dark...

Something...

Teeth!...

We snap awake, our eyes seemingly having been shut even though, in both the technical and the realistic sense of the word, we _can't_ close our eyes- it's impossible, nothing can make us blind. We can't even shut our eyes if we wish to. It's part of what we are. You literally can't make a memory blind. Hell, we don't even really have eyes. We notice (much to our unease), that we are apparently on the floor, lying flat on our backs, too. Which is even more wrong. Assuming that something _could_ knock us out (which doesn't make any sense- we're memories, not living beings!, we should probably have passed through the floor after falling down. Physical things only affect us when we want them to. They don't just affect us "automatically"; we have to will them to. Even now, as some of us test out whether we can still do that or not (and get sucked through the rooftop in the process, flapping their wings gently as they fly up and through the rooftop to land shuddering atop it), we find that yes, our control over our perceptions of the physical realm is still as good as it was. We can still go through the rooftop if we wish, and view the bored clerk inside, reading a magazine full of the latest J-Pop articles. We can even read his mind, which is, admittedly, not something many people would have trouble with (he's quite dull, this one), and some of us do this too, even throwing out a few feelers to see if anyone else is in the area. We all send out our tentacles of thought and sight into the surrounding area, seeing if anything is amiss (and if our powers are still working). The answers are no to the first, yes to the latter. Our powers are fine and back to working... but that brings up the question of whether they ever quit working at all, or why if they did. After all, the rain _did_ touch us, on the rooftop of the Mishiyama Corp., and so maybe, just maybe, whatever sent out that blast had the power to affect us too...

But that brings up the question of what in the hell _did_ just happen, and if it affected anyone. Though we know the truth through the streams of consciousness we've sent all over this city (touching millions of lives in the process, getting glimpses of so very many souls, black and white and calm and crazy and good and bad and mean and kind), we must see the truth with our own eyes. So, dazedly, we begin to get up.

We get up (shakily), and look around. The rooftop's fine. In fact, so is this whole city. The glass windows we saw buckle and break are clean, the signs that we saw knocked askew and blown away by the force of the shock from the blast that echoed out into this city are standing up neatly, brightly lit up in neon, the wires we saw snap and splutter, whipping about like headless snakes, spewing electric death everywhere they touched are fine, whole, and emitting the almost subaudible humming that all power lines resonate with. We glance about, and everyone's fine... except Stun. We rush over to him, invisible as always but, just this once, his comrades and friends, fellow victims of whatever had just happened to us. We rush over, anxious, and bend over him to look.

He groans, and we all breathe a sigh of relief. A quick check reveals his entire body in functioning order- he's just dazed. Considering the great deal of turmoil and stress we all just underwent, he's gotten off pretty lucky. He leans up and holds his head in his hand, groaning. He shakes and shivers, then slowly stands up. We move to help him, but our help is mostly in silent encouragement. A few ghostly hands pass right through him before we give up the attempt and merely move aside, in a strange attempt to give "room" to the man standing up, even though he would, of course, merely pass right through us if he happened to accidentally cross over into one of us. Stun leans up, looks up, and as he stares into the night sky, he hears the rumble of thunder.

" What...?" he mumbles, head not really hurting, just simply reeling from what has happened to him. " What...? Horrid... something... ragged... snaggle-toothed jaws... oh... Oh God... what was that? What... was that...?" Stun gets up slowly, and as he gets up he shakes violently, scared to death for one of the few times in his life. We share his sentiments.

" What... was that...? What...." Stun looks about himself and, in his daze, sees nothing at all... for a moment. Then, his head swiveling towards us, he stops and stares, his yellow eyes growing huge as he stares at the air where we stand. Worried that he is seeing us (his mind is no help as to what he sees; it is totally blank right now, having "supped full of horrors", to quote Macbeth, and too stunned to think anything right now) and sure that, though a few minutes ago, we would dismiss that as impossible, now we are not so sure. The events of this night have convinced us utterly that what we once took for granted can never be the same, and that we are not as omnipotent as we thought we were. And that scares us. As anyone who is powerful can tell you, nothing is more terrifying than that which _is_ more powerful than you. A strong man fears more than a weak man- why? The weak man is used to others being stronger, so he accepts it; a kind of default bravery, if you will. But a strong man knows he is strong, knows that others are weak compared to him- and so he is absolutely terrified when he meets someone who is stronger than he is. It is much the same thing we are feeling now; it's almost as if we have been toppled off our great height of omnipotence and taken down to the level of mere mortals. Of course, in other places and other times, we _are_ mortals, but here, we're just memories, and we shouldn't be affected by anything happening here.

Anything.

Pondering these things and the sense of newfound fear in our hearts, we hesitantly move to see if Stun will follow us with his eyes. He doesn't. Instead, he continues to stare into the sky, eyes reaching ever greater heights of wideness, and we turn around as well, to see what has so caught his attention. Our eyes widen as well.

For atop the Mishiyama Corp. is an enormous, gaping whirlpool of teeth and jaws, where some _thing_ is reaching through, teeth open wide, jaws snaggle-toothed, hideously flickering tongue tip reaching out to touch lightly upon the top of the building where Xion dances. It seems as if the storm clouds that have threatened the city all this long, long night have gathered there, circling above the black tower that is the Mishiyama Corporation, rising high in to the sky, making a funnel of sorts, where lightning seems to have no place- the clouds are too black for even the momentary brightness that is lightning to flicker across their faces. They are swirling, spinning, as if in turmoil and torment. At their end, in the great hole they have left in the sky, facing out on darkness upon darkness, something is coming through. Only the merest tip of its great tooth-hung jaws have come through- we sense that this thing is _huge_, so far beyond anything we've ever even thought of that the feelings of half-sensed fear and wonder have suddenly awakened and starting screaming at us, screaming at us to run, because whatever this thing is, it befouls anything it touches and everything it sees... the jaws are orange, a dull, dusk colored orange, the orange of befouled flesh and rotting corpses, bloated on the feed they have taken, jaws covered in slime and slobber that looks like the endless wreckage of some long-crushed city. The red drips off it relentlessly. It's teeth, ragged and tearing things, are the size of city blocks at their bases, but as short and small- and sharp- as razors at their bottom. A single tongue, thick as a building, is now reaching out, to touch the top of the Mishiyama Corporation building like some sort of unholy sign of recognition. The... the....

The demons....

They're here!...

-

Weird, huh? Thought I'd give you guys something to mull over while you go to Christmas. Have a happy Christmas, my friends. Tiger, my old friend, my good friend, and the person who introduced me (if in a rather passive way) to , I wish you a most merry Christmas indeed. Keep writing AKS, my friend, and may your life be as happy as it can be.

To VGuyver, a new friend and reviewer... Though I have not known you as long as our mutual friend, I can wish you merry Christmas as well. For some reason, I'm feeling the holiday spirit, and so I'm out delivering to all. Merry Christmas, all!

To Soundwood- I'll keep responding to your letters when I can. Be good, my young friend. And may you write well and live well in the coming year. I believe that you have the potential to be a writer, simply because your _letters _are so intelligent. Words may not make a soul, but they can tell who they are on the inside. And from your words, my friend, I believe that you may well be a writer. Do not get discouraged if what you write is not what you want- it takes a while before you gain the skill to refine the diamonds in your mind from the rough and make them into bright and glittering gemstones. Do not worry if, before you attain your skills, you seem a second-rate penny author, using an axe rather than a scalpel to hack off bits and pieces of preciousness and only gaining a few specks of gold in the rock- we all start out that way, and that axe is a blessed thing, because it shows that one has at least decided to try. When you become more accomplished, the cutting knife and paring knife will offer themselves to you in their own sweet time. Until then, cherish your axe, because it is what allows you to _write­_- and to do more, for that axe is what allows you to be free. Keep the blade sharp when you can- axes dull frightfully fast, and knives even more so- but never, ever give up. A diamond is a diamond, whether the blade used to cleave it was sharp or dull, huge or subtle, and will be recognized for what it is in all but the almost criminal manglings that some people go for. So write, my friend. Write.

Indigo Siren: Merry Christmas to you, as well, and blessings on all you do. Happy Holidays, and thank you for the reviews!

And to all and sundry- may your way be light and strong, and, in the words of an old song, I'll leave each of you off with a blessing...

_May you sing a song of love at last_

_May your words be old_

_May you sing a song in winding grass_

_May your words be bold_

_May you hope in dark and love in light_

_And never fear the cold_

_May you hold to law and hold to right_

_And never fear the old_

_May you dance across all that has_

_And never touch the ground_

_May you see the sights that make us men_

_And never feel your bound_

_May you dance across an ocean of stars_

_Til the end of time_

_May you look to the stars that guide your way_

_and never lose their shine..._

May all the blessings of this song come to you as you sit in your homes on Christmas Eve- and forever thereafter!

Merry Christmas!

-Silverlocke980


	15. And The Dream Turns Real

Hi everybody! It's great to be back. Just finished a new fanfic" Walking With the Shamed", hope you enjoy the one-shot (it's a Dead or Alive fanfiction, a game I just played recently and greatly enjoyed- once I finished laughing about boob movements, anyway).

So! Let's get to reviews, shall we?

Tiger5913- Tiger! (flying hug) Oh, I love this woman. Ponder ponder ponder... (has sudden mental image of Tiger having a very Pooh-like moment of rubbing her head and saying" Think, think think. Think, think think.") Oh well. I'd love to say "ponder no more", but unfortunately, pondering seems to be your fate as of late. Hope this chapter does something for you though, my wonderful Keniko loving friend!

And a poem for you, since you seem to have stopped updating A Killer's Seduction. Hope you like it. :)

(Note: Sing to tune of "Let It Snow")

_Have you wrote the next piece?_

_Is AKS a visual feast?  
Will you give us just the least?_

_Let us know_

_Let us know_

_Let us know_

_Have you been in a rut?_

_Have you switched to writing smut?_

_Do we have to beat you up?_

_Let us know_

_Let us know_

_Let us know_

_Are you somehow feeling blue?_

_Has it fallen like the dew?_

_Have you given us the screw?_

_Let us know_

_Let us know_

_Let us know_

Love ya, Tiger:)

V Guyver- Ah, V Guyver! Good man, nice to hear from you. Let's see... Heh, gotta love the faith a man puts in ya when the first words out of his mouth are "Hey again, let's see where this fic went"... V Guyver has apparently seen his fair share of fics crash and burn... Um, playing mix and match with reviews here, so... next question...

The Unborn thing gets kinda explained this chapter (you are both very right, very wrong, and not quite either... you'll see what I mean in a minute or two, depending on how fast you read...) The Mark does come from the Tabula, but it's witchcraft that summons the Tabula into being, so that is why it seems so odd. The witchcraft and general deviltry that Xion performs is what summons the Tabula into being. As for dancing- well, he is, but until you see what _kind_ of dancing he's doing (hint: it's not the tango or a waltz), I'd reserve judgement for a while...

Glad you like the story type. I have no _idea_ how I can explain this to anyone, or even how this thing could be written... but here it is and there goes that hat, as they say, and I seem to be inordinately fascinated with it. This is a wonderful writing style, and I suggest using it if you have a random fanfic idea that you would like to screw around with. Just remember- avoid my copyright issues, 'kay? ;) (little voice in back: _memories_, damn it, _memories!_ And I claim 'em!) I was going to start all of us off as just the wind, but then I liked the idea of "ghost beings" floating around and watching everything. Being a voyeur (just kidding, just kidding!), I found the idea fascinating, and so I began writing it like that. I really hope you guys don't mind me taking a break from the characters to focus on us, though, as we are central to what is happening in the storyline and a lot of this hour's flight is going to be dealing with us and what importance _we_ have in the story. Still...

Hope you guys like it!

One last thing. Don't know if I mentioned this before, but in your chapter 12 review, where you mentioned I didn't make the police out to be total villains, THANK YOU. I have a deep and abiding respect for police officers, and they live in a secret world where the worst things happen every day and most of what "serving justice" means is seeing a man you caught for murder get off because the tape you have of his confession isn't "admissable" because you forgot to read him his Miranda rights due to the blood in your face from the cut above your eye where the man resisted arrest at the time you were taking him in. It's a bleak, bleak world out there, and I think that cops are about the only people really worth venerating in our society. Politicians? Yeah, they talk good- but they don't do a damn thing about bringing the bad guy in. And that's really all where it counts, for me.

Probably why I'm shooting for a law enforcement degree myself, in my new college next semester...

You're deaf? Wow, that's cool. I myself have no real physical problems (other than terrible eyesight, though good ol' glasses fix that) but it's a rather interesting fact about you nonetheless. Were you born deaf, or did it happen later? I mean, I know you and Tiger know each other and that she talks a lot, but still...

(sees pissed off Tiger sharpening small claws) Hey, that reminds me! A small sidenote...

I view everyone on the Internet as a physical being in my head. Here's what I see everyone as:

Tiger5913- a hyperactive, mostly smiling cat-woman (oh, come on. Her name's _Tiger_, people. Tiger! How could I view her as anything else?) who faintly resembles Uriko's beast form from BR3, minus funky kimono (my Tiger generally just wears a loose-fitting sweatshirt and shorts, all white with green trimming, oddly- don't ask me why, green and white are just her colors). Her fur tends to be tiger orange, though once I viewed her as white. Don't ask me why- it's my mind's eye playing tricks on me, not anything else.

Plus, as mentioned above, she has sharp little claws she is sharpening right now. Ooh. Creepy. OO

V Guyver- for some reason, I see this merchant guy in my head. I don't know why, but V Guyver strikes me as this white merchant guy, in brownish red traveling clothes, with a big tan pack full of various utensils and cooking pots hanging off his back (and I do mean big; we're talking taller than he is, here), complete with a big bald head and a somewhat constant "raised eyebrow" look to him. Of course, with my string of luck, V Guyver is latin, not a salesperson, and probably has a full head of hair. Still, I see this merchant guy in my head. Huh. Weird.

Indigo Siren- A veela from Harry Potter (you know, the creepy siren women who turn into fireball flinging harpies?) pop into my head here- and it's Indigo colored. Makes a bit more sense than the way I view poor V Guyver (in my head, at least; you are talking to the man who thinks that a murderous Harry Potter, complete with his own army, makes great sense if written right).

Soundwood- Umm... this one's kind of trippy. I see Soundwood as this massive "force" that is vaguely purple-red colored, and swirls in my mind like a videotape on a black screen. The color constantly twists and whirls and reminds me of the final boss fight in the original "Earthbound" game, where the final boss wasn't a creature per se, but actually a massive, multi-dimensional being that appeared to be 2-D and flat to human eyes. Weird.

Sorry about getting off-track there... (coughs). Oh well, let's get on with the next review!

Indigo Siren: Assuming you aren't spazzing out over me telling you that you vaguely resemble either a lovely human girl or a shrieking bird of death in the preceding paragraphs, I guess I can only say: Thanks for reviewing! I know how it goes when you read a really great story, or just a long one- I've been reading "Snob School" by Kurmoi (a great story- shameless plug here!) and I'm on chapter **28 **and I still haven't reviewed yet. But that's only because it's so good.

As for my story, I have no idea why you didn't review for a while, I didn't think the story was all that great... ;)

Glad you also noticed the slight light-heartedness between Stun and Jenny- truth is, neither of their lives are all that great, his being spent as a bug man, hers being spent as a traitor and a spy- and whatever balm they can give each other's wounds is greatly appreciated and reciprocated by them both. It's like they say about hard times- you laugh all the harder so you can keep up with the tears.

Thanks for reviewing!

Okay, with that done, I shall proceed to dodge Tiger's painful little claws (ducks as she swings at him) and write this story. So, with a yelp and a cry as she pokes me in the ass, it's...

"SHOWTIME" (ouch!)

Chapter 15

The Dream Turns Real

Rooftops of Tokyo, Japan, near the Mishiyama Corporation's building, 4:35 a.m., Night of the Mark.

We stand frozen in place, the hell after-image of the gaping jaws and nightmare teeth burned into our mind as we stare at the building that we know as the Mishiyama Corporation but are already hearing a gibbering, foul, deep-fat voice whisper in our ears a different name"Blekhege". We stare, shake, step back slightly as our entire lives seem uprooted as all the world begins to turn around us and we think we're going to be sick and some of us might pass out...

But we are rescued by one who does not even know we are there. Stun lets out a great war cry, throwing his head forward, flinging his arms back, crouching at the knee, a loud, chittering, angry war cry, the rends of his soul coming out into the air, screaming his defiance and his will to live on in the face of everything tha would end it. With a sigh and a laugh, the demon, slavering, laughing jaws recede.. but not before we sense a small shock of the kind of power it wields, and we see more than feel the black bolt of something like electricity that rends through us and leaves us disoriented and in pain. Swinging around and stumbling in our daze, we only barely remember to watch Stun.

We turn in our almost drunken haze, and stare at this creature, this being named Stun, formerly Stephen Goldberg, a scientist we thought we knew well but who has surprised us with this war cry torn out from his very heart. Stun is in battle pose now, shifting to it automatically as his very soul rejected the thing it felt assaulting it; but now, the thing gone, he slowly raises up and shakes himself all over, as if awakening from a dream. Then, looking up, he takes off for the Mishiyama Corporation at a dead run. We don't even move.

Whatever happened to us is too much. We've seen a hell of a lot in this world, and we thought we knew everything, but this... this humbles us. More than the rain on the top of Mishiyama Corp. Headquarters, more than the sense we got last night that Kohryu could see us when he half-glanced at us out of the corner of his eye, more even than the idea we've had all night that there are things going on here at levels we don't even understand and can't even begin to guess at, this thing humbles us. Whatever it was on the top of the Mishiyama Corporation, it could have sucked our souls dry and licked the bones as easily as it could rend Stun's earthly body. It would have gladly done so, if given half a chance- if Stun's desperate, soul-rending heart cry had not reached it first and somehow dispelled it with that weak, chittering sound. We stand where we are and some of us even stumble back; this is where all dreams and reality leave us and we are left only with nightmare. We sit numbly on the cold, frozen ground of this rooftop in the middle of Tokyo; and even as we stare up at the building where all our petty notions of our power and grandeur were stripped from us in two events, one little and one big, we realize something.

Why the hell can we feel the ground?

Leaping up, all of us let out a cry, as we realize that suddenly, _we can feel the wind all around us._ Our wings flutter lightly in a few small breezes, the rain that's falling on this city touches our skin, and the ground below us is cold to our naked feet. (Those of us with naked feet, anyway; some of us have large, metallic greaves on, but disturbingly, those of us with them on can feel the metal, which is cold enough to make up for not touching the ground, thank you very much). As we sit and stare around at the world around us in wonder and try to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, we notice that a lot of very big, very mean-looking pools of black have sprung up all around us. The world slowly becomes more real as the shadows become more dark.

" Oh hell" one of us mutters. The puddles suddenly split and begin to form into other things. Through the glimpses we get of the shadows that occur every time the lightning that has suddenly begun striking the city (striking so hard and so fast it looks like it's attacking the city below it, and our minds, distracted as they are with events directly near us, drift over to Uranus and wonder if she has finished playing her part in this night), we see things that look like jaws, teeth, biting fangs, darkness, tentacles.

Eyes.

The shadows rush us, and in a few moments we are engaged in our first real fight in this world- though not the last, we are sure- back to back, cheek to cheek, dealing with the shadows with the claws on our hands or the knuckles on our fists. The world slowly turns more and more real to us, and suddenly the ground has weight, we have weight, and the shadows have their own weight also. The ground turns real. Getting slammed against something makes us stop, as we no longer go through it (though, with an effort of will, we find we can force our way through most material, but its sludgy, gooish, like we are swimming through slowly settling concrete), and we feel pain in our new bodies. We engage in battle, now, and all the time we spent watching this night serve us well, as our bodies, which we discover to be alternately athletic and strong, quick and powerful, agile and tough, begin mimicking the combat moves we've seen tonight, as well as other abilities that serve us more well in our somewhat changed form. One of us, a figure that looks much like a gargoyle, swings out a thick, whipping tail and trips an opponent. An almost angelic figure swings its fist down and punishes the monster, sending flaring light out from its suddenly-gone form and banishing it back to the depths of Hell. Another fighter, this one a tall figure, grabs two of his opponents and pitches their shadowy, indistinct forms in the air. With one flap of mighty wings, he launches himself upwards and grabs them both, slamming them into pavement and making light flare through their suddenly disappeared bodies. The shadows fight back, launching out with claws and tentacles and some things we don't quite see but don't quite need to see. One of us cries out as a whipping tentacle blinds them, an eye gouged out from the lashing blade. Another screams as they are slowly dragged into darkness, crying as long strands of black gunk and goo slowly overlay them and drag them towards the great mass of some dark thing, and a few brave souls rush to help our comrade, using mighty claws to hack apart the demon braids that bind the creature to them. When done, they turn these mighty claws against the shadow, and soon it too falls apart in a flash of light. We are thrown, kicked, tossed, and burned in the short time it takes us to fight these things, and we realize that, no matter how fun it looks to be when you are watching it from a distance and are safe and sound, fights are terrible, terrible things to be in the middle of, and our only objective now is to win, to scratch and claw and kick and bite until we have won. The battle goes on for some time before we are through, and even then the last shadow seems to laugh as we snap its neck and end its life. It goes to its grave gurgling.

Although it did not take us much time (a few moments, really, but a long time to us; fights really are longer when you are in them yourself), we are exhausted when we finally destroy all the skittering things around us, and, panting from exertion, we slowly look around for more. In our looking, our eyes turn to the rooftops surrounding the Mishiyama Corporation, and the scene we see there makes our eyes lock in our head.

There, Stun is running, running towards the skyscraper that even now makes us fear. And behind him, following like black trails of death, are shadows that, even as we look at them, seem to smile with terrible grins.

We look at each other, and in a moment of complete and total agreement, we nod. We realize something now. We're not brave, and we're not grand. We're not supermen, nor anything even like that. We're just mortal souls too. And though we may not be noble, we can at least help someone who is.

Let Stun give us courage, for without knowledge of what is happening tonight save that which is deep in his soul, he has shamed all of us in this act of great, sacrificing hope. He knows not what it is that he runs toward; but he knows that he must destroy it, for the sake of all things.

And we, weak beings though we be, will stand beside him and fight for him as we fly throughout this strange, dark night.

We take wing and fly.

-

Rooftops over an alleyway in Tokyo, Japan, heading towards Mishiyama Corp., 4:40 p.m.

We fly over the rooftops, feeling the world shift back into its normal (for us, anyway) state; cold and untouchable, we glide through rooftops and lamps as easy as we would glide through air. Yet we can still feel that feeling of solidity, of realness, in the world around us, and realize that this is but a temporary respite, brought about so that we may find our way to the next battlefield, the next fight. And find it we do; within moments, we have caught up to the shadows chasing Stun, and in a battle which would be stunning if not for its silence, rush them from above. Dropping like slavering demons or avenging angels (depending on the person), we drop out of the sky and divebomb our opponents. Ironically, the shadows never see us coming; much as their brethren surprised us on the rooftop of the small store a few moments ago, our appearance here surprises them, too, and they die without too much of a fight. But their death-cries (which only we hear; even as real as we are- correction, _feel_ we are- we make no sound Stun can hear, nor can he see us; a quick read of his mind in a slight moment of omniscience gained in between fights lets us know that he doesn't hear or even feel anything behind his head, be it guardian spirits or demonic hordes) alert their comrades, and they turn away from their pursuit of Stun, determined to deal with this threat first and then put an end to the bug man who so threatens everything they have worked for. Unfortunately for them, we have other plans- one punch, three claw swipes, and several divebombs later, their not-there corpses are disappearing from the sidewalks and we are flying again.

We catch up quickly to Stun, and fly in a tight packed group over his head, never considering that it might not be so smart to do so. We learn the error of our ways when a large group of shadows, massing on the rooftops overhead (we would have seen them before; but, in our "real world" form, we don't possess omniscience or even partial omniscience: just sending out one lone feeler of thought and sight is almost nigh impossible for us now), leap upon us and send most of us crashing to the ground, one shadow connecting with one of us, then both of them crashing down on the one below that, and then all three falling on whomever is below both of them. Wings break; bones shatter. Those few of us who are still in the air turn back to help, but some of our comrades shout for us to flee; already the dark grows thick around Stun as his invisible protectors are distracted. Fear making our hearts ache, we nod and acquiesce to our companion's request, only hoping we have not doomed them in the process, hearing shouts and screams as our companions turn upon their attacks. We launch ourselves forward, and now adopt a more sensible flight program; spread out, everyone watching ahead, only one vulnerable to attack at a time, keeping watch on both Stun and each other. Shadows leap out of the night, tackling some of us; those behind rescue those in front, those in front rescue those behind. Somehow, the stretch of alley becomes a mile, a thousand foot distance between the here and now, rushing from a past we can't find and a future we can't comprehend. We fly anyway, just fighting now, trusting in this hero who has stood with so many in the bleak darkness of the world. The street alley slowly turns into a tunnel; it seems as though time is bending around itself, gravity pulling us in, and the sky is closer, is on both sides of us, just like the ground is, sky and earth coming up to greet each other and somehow meeting in the middle. Stun runs on, never seeing the memories all around him as we fight from our past to save our future. Soon (though never soon enough; there is not one of us who will continue their lives, both mortal and spiritual, without bearing some scars of this hideous, terrible time, our time in hell, a spent place and a black place that closes in on us as we fly into the corridor of time and space and feel everything leave us like drops of rain washing off our skin as we fight for our lives and for the life of someone else), Stun reaches the end of the tunnel, and as we reach the side of the Mishiyama Corporation we realize that we are out of the tunnel for good now. Darkness still encroaches on us, but now the world has resumed its normal dimensions: sky above, earth below, and the horizon where it should be, far off in the distance, a sober flat point in the distance, instead of close to us, curving as if trying to bind the earth and sky as one. The skyscraper looks unimaginably huge, and as we stare up at it, we realize that Stun is going to change.

He does it in mid-run, leaping into the air and then suddenly focusing, beginning to change into the beast form we know so well, and knows he's more than a bug, more than a man, he's a spirit of ages past, a knight in shining armor, his claws great swords, his outer shell spiritual armor, the jaws of his face the sweeping cowl of an old knight's helm, his feet massive greaves of steel. His wings fly out, and their strangely weak beating is loud in the night; it is the sound of old engines starting up, of Harley Davidsons running at full power, of helicopters beginning their flights. He takes off into the air, and we with him, traveling up the sheer concrete sides of the building in a rush for the top. Stun's mind is clear; what little of it we can still glimpse is focused, charged, energized, filled to the brim with some sort of holy sense that he is right. It's not much, this sense, but it is enough for him, and enough for us. We fly into the night, and as we charge up into the darkness, we stay with him. The rain begins to pour down, and soon it is running off our forms- all our forms, for our former comrades, the ones ambushed in the alley before we really knew what we were doing when we beginning to protect Stun, have caught up with us, and though our wings are ragged and our hearts are weak, we fly on, secure in the knowledge that in this, at least, we will hold guiltless. This night shall not fall through our doing.

We fly up and up and up, and soon realize that Stun can see us; he watches us out of the corner of his eyes, as strange creatures fly up beside him, half-glimpsed in the rain. We see him slowly shake his head and continue upward, not worrying over our presence because, in our eyes as we looked up at him, this glorious hero of this world, he saw not fear or hatred, but kindness and strength. We don't know how much of either we can lend- we kind of use up most of it on ourselves- but the knowledge of our presence here comforts Stun, as he knows he is not rushing into darkness alone. We fly up and up and up, and when Stun tires, we catch hold of him gently and take him up.

We fly to the top of the Mishiyama Corporation, and there we lay him down almost gently. His feet touch the ground, and as he looks up, we turn into a blazing whirlwind behind him, flying all around, a whirlwind of teeth and claws and feathers and hands, all spinning behind Stun. We shall show this Tabula that he stands not alone.

And stand alone he does not; for Xion is up there with him, standing as well, though obviously on the other side of the board from where we lay. Xion smiles at Stun, clicks his hellish teeth at him, and then, in a voice that rankles our flesh even through all we've seen this night, he speaks to him.

" Welcome, Stephen Goldberg" Xion says, his voice thick and choky and dry and hissy all at once. For some reason, there is an underlying hint of a very feminine voice coming from underneath Xion's gravelly one, as though someone were speaking under him, prompting him, almost, in the words to say. It is very distracting, and we are fairly certain we know why we hear that voice- Xion's sister's grave was our first stop on this night, as we may remember- but it is disconcerting all the same. " I knew you would come."

" And why is that" Stun says, having no idea what this thing in front of him is but already feeling that it is very, very wrong. " What are you, anyway"

" You are" Xion says, suddenly drawing in breath sharply and almost hacking it back out onto the air, three times, each time jerking its head forward then back, forward then back, stopping before continuing on after a moment's pause when the hacking subsides" one of us now. One of our kind." It stretches out a hand. " One of the Unborn."

Stun shakes his head. " Huh? What are you talking about"

Xion begins walking forward slowly, but the way he moves is... disconcerting. Men and women have no real differences between them, but there is one subtle difference: the way the body moves when they walk. Men and women are built differently (obvious enough to anyone with a working eyeball) so the way their body shifts as they walk is different. Men have a rolling gait; their heavier shoulders and bulkier upper bodies swing and sway forward as they walk, in a very "side to side" manner that, in exaggerated form, is called the "con strut", for the massive criminals who use it as a form of intimidation. Women, on the other hand, have wider hips and generally lower centers of gravity; for this reason, it is women's _hips_ which tend to sway from side to side as they walk, as opposed to a man, who walks with his arms. As anyone can notice, very slightly built men with wide hips walk like women do, while women with built up forearms often strut like men do. This is a simple, basic fact of life.

Xion is doing _both_ things right now, in something which we are sure is against the laws of physics somehow but is not all that perfectly noticeable: he is walking with his arms swinging out and wide, but his hips are moving back in forth in time to his walking. It is an odd effect, and makes it look as if the entire creature is rippling, back and forth, like a piece of cloth strung out in a breeze and left to flap in the wind. The effect is odd, disturbing, and kind of eerie. Combined with everything else that is out of touch with this creature, we find his manner of walking only reinforces the image of "aberration" in our minds.

" You" Xion hisses, walking forward in that strange, double-strut manner" are just like me. We are both the tormented, ravaged souls of this world. I turned around and found my home here, with the darkness of this world. I found my home in a place where I can let go of everything, not worry and be _free_." Xion laughs. " You, too, suffer, my friend. You, too, know the pain and the burden of too much knowledge. I was a scientist like you, once, long ago..." Xion stops talking and seems almost to muse for a moment, before continuing with" We could be friends, you know."

" No" Stun replies automatically. Xion shakes its head.

" Please" it says" don't give me the stock answers. I've heard them all. 'No, it's not right, it isn't good, it's something foul'..." she whines in a mock tone of crying pity. " Bullshit" it says, snarling and snapping its teeth. " We both know you're smarter than that, Stun. You're deeper than that. You're not the kind to follow a God simply because He says He's good." She snaps and smiles. " You are the kind who would follow a god who knew what he was doing. A god who doesn't make mistakes."

" Your god" Stun says, raising one eyebrow (or performing the equivalent thereof- it's hard to perform facial expressions properly in beast form).

" Yes" it hisses" my god. My powerful, powerful god. And unlike your God, my god will take care of you."

Stun looks at her and says" You are a complete idiot."

Completely taken aback at his answer, she says" What? What are you"

" I believe in a God" Stun says, the word's coming quickly now, before this thing can step in and stop them. " Yes, I believe in a God, yes. I believe He is powerful. I believe He is mighty. I believe that He could come down and slay you right now, if He so chose. He's allowed hurt in my life, yes. I've been pushed around, yes. Yes, I've been beaten down. Yes, there have been times I've cursed God's name. But you know what? It never was God who hurt me; it was other people. So what do I care? Why do I want to blame someone who wasn't even there in the first place? And as for life... Life doesn't matter anyway. People lose their lives daily, usually over the stupidest of things. People are constantly dying. Why the hell do you think we always revere those who give their lives to others, instead of villifying them for being stupid and casting their life away for someone else? It's because we know that life is only valuable in the losing of it. The more life you lose in giving to others, the more life you gain in your real life, your true life, your spiritual one. I wasn't even Christian before stepping onto this platform, demon, but whatever the hell you are, I stand against it, and that puts me automatically in the Good Lord's camp."

The demon, taken aback, blinks twice, confused. " But-..."

Stun smiles. " You don't get bandaged up by Alice for three years without hearing at least a little bit about God. Heh. Guess seeing you put everything in perspective for me. Oh, and yes, where was I..."

Stun flings out his arm and lightning crackles off of it. Still somewhat shocked and amused by his own conversion to Christianity (part of his mind saying _Where the hell did _that_ come from?_), Stun launches himself into an attack, not thinking it over with himself because he knows he doesn't need to; and also that if he does then doubt will set in. And it will not even be Stun's own doubt; it will be evil doubt, foul doubt, doubt that doesn't have a purpose or a reason but exists anyway, like a dream you hate but can't help having because it is beyond your control. But if you run forward fast enough, and rush forward fast enough, sometimes you can hear it falling away.

Stun's attack catches Xion off guard. Now caught in a battle with someone it did not think it would have to fight, Xion slowly brings itself around to swinging its arm, trying to catch and claw the insect Zoanthrope as he dashes about the arena, small wings showing off their strength in small little bursts and hops, flapping lightly when he is not using them to keep them warmed up for when he does. We, too, keep our wings flapping, but that is for a different reason; we are suddenly caught up in a fight with dozens of little swarming things that are climbing up the sides of the building, and for once we begin to realize what the defenders of the Alamo must have felt like when the Mexican armies began invading their country. Or what the defenders of Stalingrad must have felt when the Germans suddenly popped up out of nowhere. Or any other place where one very small group is against one very large group. It's never very fun. Robert E. Lee, of course, was a genius at just this sort of thing, and it would be very much his style- a few dozen against what looks like two hundred? Perfect- but none of us are Robert E. Lee and none of us really have the time to go back and flip through his old strategy books to figure out a way to beat the hordes coming at us from below. Really, the only thing we have to do is buy time- if Stun can finish off Xion before we are overwhelmed, he may well end up finishing this story here and now, on a rain-soaked rooftop in the middle of the world, surrounded by more things than we can count. (Their numbers swell by the second. Oh goody.)

We stand atop the roof and begin tearing up pieces of it, flinging them down at the hordes. If these had been flung by Stun or Xion, they would have had no effect; but flung by us they become lethal weapons, and monster after monster falls at our hands. Stun and Xion battle, Stun using his wings to hop about the battlefield, flying in small, deadly bursts that give his bigger form a slight advantage when it comes to dodging blows, Xion using the strange, demonic blades that have suddenly popped out of his wrists and ankles to great effect in carving up Stun's hide. When not caught up in our own battle (the end of which is rapidly approaching as the front line of shadows gets thicker; that's going to _hurt_ when it hits) we watch theirs. Stun hops in a semi-circle, his wings buzzing, dodging Xion as his left foot blade goes flying into the air, Stun grabbing his right arm when the Unborn demon misses and proceeding to jerk and shake him when he does so. Xion goes off balance, and Stun drags him towards him, putting him in a headlock and delivering a brutal twist. On a normal man, that would have snapped his neck. Xion merely screams in pain and puts a hand in the air. The blade flicks out on it, then suddenly closes again, the red edge becoming parallel with Xion's forearm and pointing outwards at the elbow. Snarling, Xion thrusts his blade back into Stun's guts. A massive volt of electricity bursts out of Stun, and there, in that moment, we realize something: this is why Stun is here. This is why Stun has suffered in his life. In this, this one moment, this one _important _moment, his sufferings gain a value. There is too much electricity in the air. The demon's own magicks have done this, in summoning the Tabula (which, we suddenly notice, is _gone_. That causes a "Oh, shit" moment for us, wherein we stop, stare at each other, and think thoughts along the lines of "Oh, shit" for a while, but then we notice that the shadows have advanced a good four stories when we weren't looking, and though those bastards started at the bottom of the skyscraper, boy, do they travel fast; we resume our rock-pitching activities and continue watching the fight) and creating a habitat the ravenous demon in it could be comfortable in. Stun is now immune to most of Xion's attacks, and even the worst get deflected off of him; he's absorbing the electricity, he's _eating _it, and it is making his already fast healing factor grow ten times more powerful than it already is. His attacks are stronger, too; each hit is electrically charged, a thunderclap, and the demon thunderstorm that Xion summoned to this area has become filtered through Stun's own body and turned into Stun's own thunder, his own personal power charge, and the Insect Zoanthrope is moving far too fast for the demon to keep up with. This is a battle Xion is losing, and it knows it.

As Xion attempts a powerful spinning kick, Stun dashes in under Xion's outstretched, twirling legs and grabs him before he can bring down his foot on Stun's head, tackling the thing from below and sending it flying to the ground. On top of it now, Stun proceeds to lay a heavy blow on Xion's face before grabbing his head and once more breaking his neck, this time in a very cool, one handed strike where Stun simply put his left hand on Xion's face, palm on the upper part of Xion's left cheek, thumb pointing towards jaw, and quickly flipped it up. Xion screams again, but this time it is louder; even demons can't take that kind of punishment for long, and soon bucks its body in a crazed attempt to knock the Insect Zoanthrope off. Stun merely grabs Xion's throat and proceeds to bash Xion's face in with the palm of his hand. Xion screams and finally bites Stun, which does make the Zoanthrope stand up off of him... but that's only because he can't toss Xion while he's sitting on him. Punching Xion in the head again to make him let go, Stun grabs him with one hand and spins, chucking the demon across the rooftop and into a small air-conditioning unit. The unit crumples and nearly flattens when Xion hits it. Groggily, Xion gets up, Stun already calmly walking across the rooftop to finish him off with a high-flying toss and maybe an impale on those giant ass jaws of his.

Desperately, it turns to its deadly magicks for help, and even as it begins mouthing the words to a spell, Stun slams the ground with his fist and sends shockwave after shockwave rippling through the earth. The electricity finds Xion and proceeds to cook him. We actually see lightning zig-zagging from spiked tooth to spiked tooth as the demon's maw snaps open and shut. As Stun withdraws his claw, Xion stumbles, looks around,

And suddenly disappears without a fight, in a small poof of white smoke. We, too, give up without a fight; we fly away from the walls as the shadows reach the fourth to last story and grab Stun, not bothering to try to explain to him what we are doing, not bothering to explain that hordes of large, demonic, and mostly invisible shadows are trying to eat us right now, and we fly away from there, away from there, back towards safety, back towards home.

Stun, who has learned, if nothing else, to ignore the crazy things that happen to him, merely sighs in our arms as we drag him towards safety.

We take wing and fly.

-

Whoo! Different, I'd say! Very different! Hope you liked the fight at the end- I did, anyway- and for those who wonder about Stun's "conversion", TRUST ME. I did say this fic was going to be heavily religious, didn't I? Besides, we're fighting demons here. D-E-M-O-N-S. Probably the last thing you'd like to try tackling without the aid of God.

The final attack Stun was planning was his BR3 Rage attack. Not sure of the name...

Hope you guys liked it! R R please!


	16. A WellDeserved Rest

Hey everybody! Yeah, I know- finally, Silver updates! Well, I only received _one_ review of my last chapter, but I don't mind that so bad... I love you guys anyway!

REVIEW:

Tiger5913- Hey Tiger! Glad to see you got your name back the way it used to be. It was really confusing when I went there and saw "Forever Tiger" written on the page- it was like, " Hey, who went and stole Tiger's profile page? I have to go get her back!" I was spared an attempt to rescue your ass by reading the profile and figuring out it was still you. Regardless of the name, you're everybody's favorite Tiger ("A rose by any other name smells as sweet"... indeed, Juliet, indeed), but it's still nice to still see you as your old name, rather than some new-fangled "Forever Tiger" name.

Heh, makes me think what I'd do if they changed _my _name on me... I'd probably call myself "Silvery" or something like that... Heh.

Still, on the review itself:

I'm really glad you liked Stun's final fight scene, it was a distinct pleasure to write. Though, I kinda want to go back and change the conversation between him and Xion... the spirit of it is correct, but it's not exactly too abrupt, but simply "un-Stun like". Not the conversion- that, might I add, gets dealt with later- but rather, more the way he does covert. For some reason, I never thought Stun would be the one to spout out pain, suffering, and the fact that God has nothing to do with it in my mind. Heh. Guess that goes to show that sometimes, you can't change a character... they end up changing _you_.

I do, however, have a gripe against I hate their frigging new QuickEdit system, as it screws with all of my punctuation. Sentences don't come out like they should. Oh well. I'll try to fix that this chapter. And if anyone has any idea how to keep it from deleting punctuation, and especially my particular problem, help me out here.

Now, here's my problem (at least the one I'm familiar with at the moment): whenever I am writing a sentence and break it in the middle, using a quotation mark to end that particular part of the sentence before stating something else and going back to it, it deletes all the punctuation before that quotation mark. Example: I write " Sandy runs" and then something about the beach she's on (don't worry, that part isn't supposed to have punctuation), and, if I put a comma before "runs", it deletes the comma. If I put an exclamation mark there, that gets deleted too! Any idea how to help?

Even if you don't, reviews are welcome. :) Oh well, it's time to get this show on the road. So...

"SHOWTIME! "

Night of the Mark

Chapter 16

A Well-Deserved Rest

Rooftops of Tokyo, Japan, near the headquarters of the Mishiyama Corporation, 5:15 a.m., Night of the Mark.

We fly over the rooftops with Stun in our grasp, fast losing our grip on reality (it was strange, wasn't it, to fly into this night without warning or prelude, and actually fight in it? To fight for this world, like the heroes we so admire do? It was fascinating, wasn't it?) but so far managing to keep enough to keep Stun firmly in our hands. As we fly away from the now empty rooftop of the Mishiyama Corporation (the shadows that were running up its sides did reach the top, about a second after we left it- they had reached out at us with slavering jaws and claws that swung so fast they howled- but a few good tail smacks and the fierce fists of one of our feathered number were enough to drive those off, and we have escaped without casaulties), we notice that the rain that's falling over the city hasn't stopped- it's gotten harder. As the sledgehammer raindrops pound the ground, we think we realize something- we have greatly annoyed Xion, stalled Xion, halted Xion- but we have not stopped him. No, not when the world is still like this. Xion won't go down so easily; and if he can't fight the bug man on his own grounds, then he'll fight the bug man on his. This has not been the last fight between Xion and Stun, I believe.

I think you do, too.

As we fly through the night, bearing our precious cargo, we find that Stun has relaxed in our arms- he still doesn't know quite who we are, but we have taken him from danger, and he's content with that. Of course, he doesn't know about the crawling shadow-demons that covered the Mishiyama Corp.'s rooftop after his fight with Xion ended, but he does know that something happened, and that's good enough for him. We fly on into the night, carrying our silent burden, and watch what is going on around us.

The world itself seems to be splitting apart- the lightning strikes and the sky rumbles, and it's almost as if the ground itself is trembling, even though it is the sky which is doing all the moving and shaking here. As we fly through the night and witness all that is going on around us, we notice that the lightning is decreipt and jagged- it's kind of like a knife edge that is slashing through the black, making the sky around it white for a second as it flashes down. It seems almost raggedy, torn apart, as if its falling apart while it attacks the city, and will soon disperse into random electrons when it dies. We fly through the night, and bear our hero.

We eventually find a good rooftop, and set him down gently atop it- no good trying to be rough with him, the poor man has had about all he can take today- and we slowly melt back into the air even as he turns to watch us go. He doesn't know who, what, or (and maybe this is the really important part) even _why_ we are, we stood in the darkness and the rain with him, and that light can carry on even when we do not. He turns to watch us leave, and with a strangely beautiful smile on our lips, a smile that we did not summon but that came out us anyway, one that makes us think that somewhere, deep in our heart, someone is thanking him for his choice here tonight, we disappear into smooth, quiet nothingness.

But fade entirely we do not- our senses begin working again, and we realize that we are back in business, back in control, back in _power_, and a few of us let loose a couple of shouts of joy that echo silently in the silken night. Joyous that our partial omniscience and invulnerability have returned to us, we spin in the air, clap, and dance. This is a happy time, and a joyous one.

But a time is all it is; like all time, it passes on, and soon, we are involved back in the affairs of the world, and must continue our journey in the night. It shall not be long now, though; for even now, as we begin to fly, the sun itself is rising, and soon, in but a few hours, it will rise. But until then, we have much to do, but (oddly for us and most others) much time to do it in.

We fly.

Tokyo, Japan, 5:30-7:00 a.m., final hours of the Night of the Mark.

We fly throughout Tokyo, Japan, this early morning, and we see the sights that need to be seen; we see all and hear what is in even the darkest of hearts. We see the clean-up crews passing by the alley that Yugo stopped in and removing some odd traces of lupine hair that have scattered everywhere, which is odd, considering that Yugo was not in wolf form when he caught sight of the Heaven Breaker, but not so odd when we consider everything else that has happened here tonight, and that, try as we might, we cannot help but think that the beast form within mimics the human without. We notice the small, slightly muffled sounds of tears coming in from an open window; Alice is asleep in her home, and when she is gently awoken by a slight tapping on her door (which is still slightly ajar; blocking most of the outside world, but a slight hint of the night air wafts in through its cracks, and it is through these we slip into her house on this last run of our magnificent, star-filled night), she walks down to it to see who is standing there, and finds Yugo, still partially deaf but mostly strong, standing there, waiting. We see her eyes light up and tears fill them as she grabs him in a fierce hug, and he reciprocates, and something happens; For there, in front of her door, they make love, almost falling over themselves in their desperate need to touch each other and be warm. Yugo pulls her away from the door, into their living room, mouth biting her as he seeks to be warm and put his love at ease; Alice, her own mind filled with nothing more than a mad, desperate relief that he is _alive,_ kisses him back just as fiercely as she pulls him on top of her. They make love to each other, and in the morning, when they awake, they are slightly disgruntled and almost embarassed by what they have done, but somehow, neither is apologetic, neither is ashamed; for whatever they have done, it was right, and it was okay. Alice spends the next few days praying "Holy Mary" after her Catholic guilt instincts kick in and she feels slightly guilty for it, and even Yugo mumbles a half-hearted apology to God every now and then, but they both sense that, though not _strictly_ right, it's a bit like stealing bread because you are starving to death; it's not supposed to be right, but circumstances can convene to make it right, and that makes it okay. They both soon get over it and go on with their lives- which get a lot more complicated after this night, and especially after Busuzima enters their lives again. But that's a story for another night- or, more correctly, a couple of nights from now.

We fly through the streets, and reach his house; Shina is there, asleep on Yugo's couch, having called the hospital and telling them to tell Gado and Long where she is spending the night, keeping watch on Uriko and Kenji, who are upstairs, kind of being half-shy about being in a single bed with each other, though not really shy at all as they curl into a small ball around each other and rest. Kenji could have slept in his own bed, but Uriko was scared- not of anything or for herself, but scared for _him_- and that knowledge humbled Kenji into cuddling with her in Yugo's bed, up above Shina's head, and though they haven't done anything yet as they are both tired and young and not actually all that interested in doing anything, that possibility is still there, and both have trouble sleeping this night. When Kenji, however, finally moves his arm and puts it behind Uriko's head (it had begun to fall asleep in it's half-awkward position of being thrown back from his body, away from Uriko, afraid that if he touches her she'll slink away from him), she looks at him with her cat-like night eyes (she has excellent night vision, on par with Shina's, though not quite so good as Long's- Kenji's mole counterpart has never had a need for eyes and has generally terrible vision, especially at night, which has led to Yugo jokingly saying "blind as a mole" when referring to Kenji's night vision), and, seeing the honest worry and sadness on his face for her, arms. Kenji, in the mental conversation he's been having with himself over Uriko and her beauty (though not literally, this time; he's actually talking in his head with himself, not Bakuryu, like a normal person does every now and then) is surprised to hear Bakuryu leap in near the end, as he finally drifted off to sleep, with a small, " Hey, Kenji."

" What? " Kenji says, slightly spooked.

" Good night, sleep tight, " Bakuryu says, his harsh voice somehow managing to sound not so rough this night. " And when you wake in the morning... "

" What? " Kenji says again, still not trusting Bakuryu and still worried over what he might say.

" Give her a good pinch in the rear for me. " With that, Bakuryu (in a rather impromptu manner) falls asleep, his mind like a slightly slumbering, oozing form in the back of Kenji's mind. Kenji blinks once or twice (mentally) and then, shrugging it off, proceeds to fall asleep. Like a litany from the back of his subconscious (past where even Bakuryu goes), this is the last he hears before he sleeps:

" Remember your promise... Remember your promise..."

And, of course, the line that he is asleep before hearing but which haunts him anyway:

" It will curse you more than you can know."

We fly.

We go to the hospital, and there, under the watchful eyes of a pair of nurses, Gado and Long slowly heal from their terrible wounds. Gado and Long had enough sense as they reached the hospital to try to fix the worst of the visible damage; that way, they can now heal the internal damage without the nurses noticing (had they not fixed the outside damage first, they would have had to contend with two very freaked out nurses, running and screaming that their patients' wounds were healing by themselves and that the world must be very wrong at the moment), and the result is that the two are going to be able to spend the next few hours in a relatively peaceful state as they rest and recuperate from their wounds. Long himself expects to stay quite a while whilst he heals wounds; his injuries were very bad, and that which he has will take him some time to recover from. Gado himself is feeling quite frisky, as his body has already managed to heal most of the critical damage he received and what is left amounts to nothing more than flesh wounds for the old goat. Gado is tough; long hours spent in harsh, terrifying environments have accustomed him to hardship, and when he is not suffering himself, he is often taking the suffering for others. Gado is used to leaping in the way of enemy attacks; he's spent a lot of time protecting his friends from pain by absorbing it himself. That is even how he lost his eye; a crazed Japanese mercenary he had met, one who had read the code of bushido a million times over in _Book of Five Rings_ (that wondrous book that Long himself has perused a million times over; Musashi would sit up in his grave if he had any idea how popular that book has become in this world, or how important it will be to this central story when it is all over) and carried a Japanese katana with him always, ended up fighting him on the field of battle and had almost been about to kill him when a friend had run up and kicked the guy in the knee. Turning, the madman had slashed at him, but a nimble dodge had saved Gado's African mercenary friend, whom he had jokingly called "Akimbo" (it rhymed with his real name) because of his long legs and arms, and when the madman had tried again, this time deciding to use the point (bad idea; katana are meant for cutting, not piercing), Gado had managed to get up off the ground he'd been so unceremoniously thrown to and push his friend out of the way. For his trouble, his eye was torn out as the would-be samurai's aim missed and connected with Gado's cheek. Meeting harder-than-expected resistance there, he'd suddenly whipped his blade up, and...

Well, there had went Gado's eye. Snicker-snack. As consolation, a friend of Akimbo's had proceeded to blow the madman's brains out as Gado fell. Gado still remembered the shotgun blast. It was the last thing he had heard before passing out.

Anyway, the point is, Gado's used to pain, and as he heals himself up he thinks that it's not so bad. For a man just fried by a million volts of electricity (approximately) he is in remarkably good health, and might even be out of here by tomorrow. Of course, he would never _leave_ tomorrow- oh, no, that would raise the doctors' suspicions faster than anything, for a patient so badly injured to just get up the next day and be fine- but he thinks that he is well enough to do so if he so decides, and that's good enough for him.

Long, for his part, is going to be spending a lot longer than one night healing his wounds- and they hurt like hell, too, which doesn't help his situation much- and as he lays there he ponders over his fate. It's interesting, to him, to wonder about the differences in fighting and healing between himself and Gado. The nurses are watching them, and he hasn't said a word once, but Gado has managed to choke out a few garbled responses to their words (lies;... Gado can speak perfectly fine now, but he's supposed to have slight brain damage and a concussion, so he really shouldn't be just chatting away with these people, again a case where his true powers as a Zoanthrope could not be revealed just yet), and so Long has begun considering just why Gado is so tough and he is not. A mere moment's thinking does the trick; Long realizes that Gado is tougher than he because Gado is a soldier, a warrior, someone who tends to get out there and do his job, regardless of the consequences or opponents in his way. Long is an assassin; he tends to sneak about, striking his enemies from behind, skipping those foes he can and going straight for the jugular of the ones he can't. Gado moves and attacks like a bulldozer, plowing through enemies with short, brutal attacks that usually result in broken necks and shattered bones; Long fights like the wind, moving swiftly and quickly through his opponents, using lighter attacks that result in slashed throats or gutted bodies. Gado doesn't bother dodging enemies, and so takes the punishment they give out. Long, on the other hand, focuses completely on dodging enemies, sometimes to the point of not even bothering to engage them so that he can continue towards his main target.

Thoughts continuing, Long sees that both he and Gado have their advantages- while Long's fighting style is without doubt somewhat easier on mind and body and gives him the advantage of seeming as slippery as shadow and strong as darkness, Gado inspires fear, and heartens those of his comrades who see him holding back the tide with his sheer strength alone. Long almost grins at the contrast. Gado has always fought beside others; henceforth, his combat is geared towards both guarding, protecting, and motivating others. Long has always fought alone; his fighting style is that of a loner. Gado is used to fighting groups- he is used to attacks he can't dodge and so has become tougher, more immobile, and has the undoubtedly better technique when dealing with a group than Long, who's art, while flashy, stylish, and powerful, is geared towards lone enemies, who he has always targeted. Long's big combo strings are intended to absolutely rip one enemy to shreds- if he tried them in a crowd, he'd get killed by someone else as he was focusing on the man in front of him. Gado's not so tough against one enemy, as he hasn't quite figured out how to "trap" them like Long does, keeping them off balance with long attacks and sudden shifts between hesitation and offensive... but against groups, Gado can bring his short attacks into full focus, quick and short movements letting him damage one enemy and quickly switch to another before someone can sneak up and hurt him. The two styles are quite at odds, Long realizes.

We leave Long to his philosophical musings and fly onward, onward, to Jenny, and as she lies on her bed in the room with the now-shut window (we slip in through a small crack between it and the stone brick facade outside, going in under the window, so to speak), she wonders about what happened tonight. She wonders if something terrible really did happen to her... and then her hand touches the scars on her stomach and she knows. Shivering (and not from cold), Jenny pulls her covers tighter to herself and prays for Stun's safety. She has no religion, but tonight it feels good to think that somebody's up there, watching over you. Jenny falls asleep whispering that, if there really is a God,she wants Him to know that Stun has to be okay. He has to be okay.

Watching her, one could almost feel like there was love there. Almost.

We fly.

Yugo's house, Tokyo, Japan, 7:30 a.m., final hours of the Night of the Mark.

Sunrise.

We fly on, and eventually find out that Stun himself is heading back towards Yugo's this night, and that is where the strangest of things will happen on this new, great-hearted morning for the world. For when he knocks on the door, he is greeted by Shina, and after a first strange proclamation abouyt being woken up so damn early, and a second strange proclamation as she discovers the appearance of the bug man on Yugo's front door tonight, she lets him in. A long story unfolds as Shina speaks to him, relaying all that Alice has told her of this night. Of course, she doesn't know _all_ that's happened in this night; but she tells Stun all she does know, and he files it away in the back of his mind. Nodding softly to her, he begins to speak, and we, the silent ghosts who have helped save this world (well, a hero of it, anyway- give us our moment, will you?), perch nearby to listen. Maybe he senses us; maybe not. But he does begin to smile.

" Shina, come here."

Shina, eyes dead but still curious, walks over to him, arms folded over. As Stun looks outside, the world begins its first soft, hesitant glowings, as the sun starts to rise over the city. Stun walks to the door and out it; turning, he makes a great leap and lands on top of the house, then another, until he is standing on top of one of the bigger buildings in the area. Shina, curious but confused, leaps up after him, having to scrabble slightly for purchase as she makes her way to the top of the building he is on. From where they are at. they can see over the tops of buildings to the mighty bearings of the great harbor of Tokyo, and past that, the sea. There, far off in the distance, some kind of light is rising. It's holy, almost.

" Shina, " Stun says, after a moment of silence, in which both he and Shina think thoughts that are not too far apart in spirit. " do you ever wonder why we're here?"

Shina coolly considers this, not even batting an eye at such a strange question at the end of such a strange night, then says, " No. "

Stun takes a slight breath and says, " Shina, do you ever think that maybe there's light out there? That maybe, somewhere, far away, there's some kind of light and beauty... "

HIs words trail off, and both sit there watching the sunrise as we circle about them and wait. Stun speaks again, slower, more softly. His words almost sound like a benediction, given to the poor.

" Do you ever wonder that maybe there's holiness out there, Shina? Do you ever think that maybe there's something out there that so beautiful we can't even imagine it? And that maybe... instead of it being the fragile beauty we're supposed to protect, that it's the thing protecting us? Do you ever wonder that, Shina?"

Shina says nothing, merely watches the sun rise. She knows he has more to say, and stands there to hear him say it. She does not understand what he is talking about, but she does know this- whatever he is saying, it is important to him, and she will listen to it. She owes him that much, at least.

" Shina, I think I've found the key to life. "

Shina greets this with calmness, and some curiosity.

Stun points to the sun.

" There it is, " he says simply. And we look and see that it is true.

The sun rising is not just the sun- it's the sum of all the good in the world. And as it blazes down, burning the night that once was and eliminating the memory of it in the streets, we realize something- this is what it was all for. The pain of this night does not stand up to the glory of this one single morn. And though the world is still dark and the nighttime has moved on to the other side of the planet, here the sun is shining, and that has made it all right. The world is not empty of pain; but something mightier than tears does exist, and for that, we are grateful.

We turn to see the dawn and wait.

Whew, guys. Last chapter. I can't believe I'm finished with it... almost two seasons too late, but it's here now, and I'm done. I'm glad to have seen all of you guys here, and I love what you've said about my story. Thank you all very humbly for what you've done, and I'm grateful to you all. And to you...

My friends, keep going at it while you still can. Tiger, never stop writing and never let fear bother you- you have traveled more roads than I can imagine and still keep your head held high, and that, my friend, indicates that you have more steel in you than you dream. Keep going, my friend. You'll find your light in the darkness ahead.

V Guyver, keep on reviewing, buddy. And hold your head up high, too, for there's a lot of tears in this world, and they all want to drown you... but if you can still remember to find the light, you can swim past them and climb ashore. And then, maybe, you can even help others aboard the one boat that can never sink.

Indigo Siren, you keep on chucking, too. We all need a friend in our lives, and it's been good to have you. And I hope you return for the sequel.

As for you, Soundwood, if you still exist and still bother to read my tired old crap. Thank you for being such a wonderful person to talk to, and an interesting project to start on. I believe that, in a way, you might even supersede me and Tiger in your writing... for your ideas are original and your possibilities great. Keep writing, Soundwood. And send to me if you like. There can be no greater honor than helping someone become a greater person than I am.

See you all in the sequel.

Your Friend, Author, and Writer,

SILVERLOCKE980

Fin


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